For many people, the uncertainty of weeks or months of Coronavirus isolation is not just troubling, it can take a significant toll on mental health and well-being. It's safe to say, that in these current times, we urgently need to finds ways to maintain mental wellness at home, as well as sustain our mental performance abilities.  With the aim of providing solutions when they’re needed most, we will discuss why NeuroTracker and similar remote services offer real telehealth opportunities, and how you can start growing your remote training offerings today.

What are the Challenges of COVID-19 Lockdowns?

When isolated and less mentally active than normal, our neuroplasticity is actually set to work against us – pruning away synapses and neural connections in a game of ‘use it or lose it’. This can also impact our physical health, with recent research showing that social isolation can increase our body’s inflammation levels.

Maintaining quarantine status amid an international emergency brings societal and psychological pressures of anxiety, stress, and potentially despair. Older adults quarantined from their family members, may be facing a significant degree of social isolation and worry. Students, whose schools are closed, need an outlet for social interaction and innovative strategies to maintain academic engagement. Athletes, whose seasons have been canceled, must find other ways to keep their minds and bodies “in game-day shape.” Clinical patients whose appointments have been canceled, need alternative strategies maintain their regimens at home.

As part of quarantine efforts, medical centers and clinics around the world have been shutting down. However, if these medical services can instead deliver telehealth solutions, then people can access supervised treatment in their homes, right when they need it most.

What are the Benefits of Telehealth?

Telehealth services use dedicated software and communications technologies to deliver health services remotely. The goal is to allow health professionals to remain connected with clients, even when face-to-face service is not an option. Telehealth allows health professionals to cater to the needs of a much broader range of patients.

The upside for the patient is the convenience of being managed by a health specialist, without needing to leave home. Fluid communication between parties is the oil which keeps the cogs of telehealth services working efficiency.

Here are 3 major advantages that telehealth brings to the table during COVID-19 lockdowns, illustrated with examples specific to NeuroTracker.

1. Leveraging Digital Therapeutics – as we have written before, digital therapeutics are the dawn of a new era of healthcare driven largely by evolutions in software capabilities and AI. NeuroTracker is a member of the Digital Therapeutics Alliance and a front-running neurotechnology, bringing innovations in neuroscience into everyone’s reach.
2. Personalized Services – the best telehealth practices merge the expertise of professionals together with intelligent software that can adapt to each person’s on-going needs. NeuroTracker allows clinicians to create custom training or rehabilitation protocols and assign them on an individual basis. In parallel with this, the software also automatically adapts and fine-tunes the difficulty of training to the precise needs of the person, every step of the way.
3. Constant Care – while a healthcare center can never be running 24/7, telehealth services can. For people working from home or caring for others, being able to run a 6-minute NeuroTracker session at any time, makes boosting mental abilities super convenient. And because a clinician can easily check on a client’s progress and interact with them at any given moment, training programs can be easily supervised.

How to Get Started with NeuroTracker

We currently have 3 NeuroTracker platforms, the Standalone version for in-center use only, the Cloud version for training through a web browser, and our new NeuroTracker X platforms, which expands the product’s functionality to meet telehealth needs. Here we’ll walk through the key steps for getting your users up and running remotely using some examples with NeuroTracker X.

1. Add a New User – when you are logged into your administrator’s dashboard, you can see all your current users on your organization page. From here, simply click the ADD USER button, fill in the user’s personal details and email, choose their starting program, and then click invite. NeuroTracker will now send the user an email which will take them through the sign-up and quick installation. You will be able to see them as an active user on your dashboard from the moment they get setup.

2. Your User’s Dashboard – with a single click you can view any of your users’ live personal dashboards from your administrator’s account. Your users simply click the GET STARTED button to run sessions, and they can see what’s lined up in the program on the top-left area, as well their performance data on the main interactive results chart.

3. Customizing a User’s Training Program – NeuroTracker X comes with a range of pre-loaded programs to cover a wide variety of performance, rehabilitation and wellness protocols. You can simply select a user and queue as many programs as you like, as well skip any programs previously lined-up. If you have the advanced version of NeuroTracker X, you can go one step further by designing your own custom programs. This includes mixing up everything from different session types, numbers of targets and tracking duration, to setting questionnaires and dual-tasks.

Ways to Take Telehealth to the Next Level

So we have covered how the NeuroTracker software can serve telehealth needs. However, if you want to reach a big audience remotely, you will need some key tools and know-how to help you get the job done.

1. Video Conferencing – to attract and manage users at scale, you should leverage a video communications tool. We recommend Zoom as a flexible yet easy-to-use tool, which can also stream conference calls via Facebook live.
2. Mail Manager – tools like Mailchimp will help you send out professional and media rich emails en masse, but with minimal time invested. They will also give you valuable statistics on how receptive or active your potential audience is.
3. Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) – if you’re looking to really grow your telehealth business, then a CRM tool like Hubspot will be essential for keeping your operations on-track and professionally organized. It may take some time to setup properly, but it will make managing a growing client list much simpler.
4. Monitor New Regulatory and Insurance Policies – in a bid to support telehealth and telemedicine services during COVID-19 quarantines, many governing bodies are adapting their legislation on a weekly basis. You will need to keep an eye out for emerging opportunities for reimbursement and financial support specific to the telehealth services you provide.

Watch our NeuroTracker Telehealth Webinar

The NeuroTracker team recently presented a live webinar called ‘Telehealth Solution to Service Your Clients from Home’, which included guest speaker and neurovision expert Keith Smithson. To learn more about telehealth, as well as get insights on the new capabilities of the NeuroTracker X platform, watch the webinar recording below. Or if you have any questions for our team to answer on your telehealth needs, please email us at info@neurotracker.net

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