Two weeks ago, we covered some very basic stuff on how to keep your practice running remotely amid the self-isolation and social distancing procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic. As these measures continue to keep people isolated in their homes, now seemed like a good time to provide a more in-depth review of how Binovi can be used to keep up with patients and their vision therapy needs.
What You’ll Need
For starters, you’ll need a subscription to Binovi. With that, you get access to Binovi Pro (and Binovi Academy), and Binovi Coach.
Binovi Pro
This is the tool used by vision therapy and vision training practitioners to manage patients, review data, assign home therapy activities, and keep in touch. It’s also where you’ll find Binovi Academy, our eLearning tool, and the content that goes along with that.
Binovi Coach
Patients get their assigned home therapy plans in the Binovi Coach app. For families with multiple children in vision therapy, the same set of login credentials can be used to access any and all associated child accounts quickly and conveniently.
Binovi Kit
While not necessary, Binovi Kit includes all the tools patients need to complete their home therapy easily and effectively. These tools are likely the same ones you’re using in your practice, making Binovi Kit an easy addition to your arsenal.
Working remotely with Binovi
Getting the most out of Binovi when working with patients remotely may seem daunting but is actually quite easy. Binovi was, after all, designed with this in mind, as one of our goals from the very start was trying to make vision therapy more accessible, especially to those in communities where vision therapy practices were few and far between. Just follow a few simple steps!
Organization
Binovi helps you keep things neat and tidy —and easily searchable! Use Binovi pro to create patient profiles for each patient and use the built-in tools to help manage those patients, including things like tags for the specific members of their care team.
We’re working on some additional filtering resources to help you stay organized in this respect, to be released soon!
Many families will have multiple children, or a parent and a child, in vision therapy at the same time. These kinds of situations are easy to manage and help keep your patients organized.
Patient profiles include more than just the basic information you might expect. These detailed accounts of patient activity include their performance on every in-office and at-home activity assigned, your team’s notes, and the messages back and forth between your team and the patient. Explore these screens carefully to gain insight from the different forms of qualitative and quantitative data that is collected.
Content Creation
With your standard Binovi account you get access to a collection of activities from Dr. Robert Sanet, a world-leader in the world of vision therapy. Each of these included activities comes complete with descriptive step-by-step instructions and photos, but also have HD video examples, demonstrating the activity in detail. These videos can be especially useful when working remotely to ensure that patients are still performing their activities correctly, even outside the office.
Any downtime you have now can also be put to good use, creating activities and videos of your own to add to your organization’s library. If you have your own activities, or variations not included in the Binovi library, add them in! Creating photos and video content to along with them isn’t necessary, but definitely encouraged.
Operations
With each patient comes an individual need and goal. To achieve those goals, home therapy activities are usually assigned that help maintain and improve vision performance between visits to your practice. When in-person visits are not possible, these home therapy activities become even more vital!
We’re working on a whole new way to assign home therapy activities that includes pre-planning weeks in advance!
From the patient profile, create a customized home therapy plan that is catered towards each patient’s needs and abilities. Under normal circumstances, these plans are revised every week during in-person visits where your team can assess progress and review the data collected; this can mean anything from holding course and continuing on the same plan for another week to a complete overhaul! In any case, Binovi tracks what is added and removed, and keeps a log of what activities are assigned so that you can always refer to.
Data Reporting
As patients complete their assigned activities in Binovi Coach, the quantitative data that is sent back to Binovi Pro can provide insight into how patients are progressing and what activities they may be struggling with —or which ones they’re breezing through! Use this information to adjust activity difficulty and ensure patients are always making progress and not stagnating.
In addition, patients are asked to respond to a number of questions about their own self-reported symptoms and feelings regarding their vision therapy progress. Qualitative feedback like this gives an added dimension to the pure numbers, and can provide you with additional insight.
Communication
Keep everyone in your team in the loop with patient notes, and stay in constant contact with patients using Binovi’s built-in secure messaging. Notes help keep everyone on the same page, and can help a remote team stay informed regardless of where they are. Patient messaging also means that your patients always have a way to get in touch with you, and keeps your communications organized and easy to manage.
Going the extra mile
While maintaining in-person visits to your office may not be possible during this time of self-isolation and social distancing, it’s still possible to get face-to-face time with patients even when working remotely. We encourage our teams to work with a trusted video-conferencing or video-chat provider to provide some much-needed inter-personal contact. These sessions can be a great stand-in for in-person meetings, but can also help you broaden your scope and provide services to clients outside your area as well.
Using Binovi to work remotely can be easy and rewarding for both your staff and your patients as it provides a certain stability and routine to the every day, and can keep your clinic running through difficult times.
Options include using your Facebook page as a hub, Apple’s FaceTime directly from your Binovi iPad, Google Duo, Skype, Zoom.us, and more. As always, be sure to check with your jurisdiction to see if there are any suggestions or limitations regarding these kinds of options.
Join a seminar
Want to know more? We’re holding group video seminars with members of the Binovi Customer Success Team to help guide our provider network with support during this trying time. Spaces are limited to ensure we’re able to connect with everyone in a meaningful way, so reserve your spot today!
