Sara Vaezy serves as Chief Digital Strategy and Business Development Officer at Providence.
Sara will speak at Becker's Healthcare Telehealth Virtual Forum. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the virtual event, which will take place on November 2-3, 2020.
To learn more about the conference and Sara's session, click here.
Question: What tools do hospitals and health systems need to maintain telemedicine growth post-pandemic?
Sara Vaezy: Independent from tools, health systems need to execute on offensive strategies to deliver robust virtual care offerings to their populations—far beyond the lightly differentiated, single-service offerings that are becoming commoditized. Instead, value will flow to platforms supporting multi-modal, application-agnostic, distributed care in which workflow is the source of value—not merely the ability to deliver a video visit.
Q: What do clinicians want most from their telemedicine platforms?
SV: Providers need to be armed with a system that doesn’t require them to navigate different workflows for different platforms. In other words, we shouldn’t be exposing our providers to the complexity of all the different platforms they’ll ultimately be dealing with. Furthermore, we need to have reimbursement, payment, and compensation models that support providers in a sustainable way. Under a fee-for-service model, providers would need to conduct approximately 5 video visits per hour to generate the revenue they historically made with 3 in-person visits, which is not sustainable and can worsen burnout. Instead, we need to support changes toward value-based payment and compensation models that decouple providers from the visit-based fee structure and can instead replace some in-person visits with a combination of virtual visits and several AI-assisted automated digital interactions with the patient, offering a higher level of service at a lower cost.
Q: Where is the biggest opportunity for telemedicine and how can hospitals and health systems best take advantage of it?
SV: For health systems, the future of virtual care will not simply be video visits or asynchronous chat, but a suite of services, leveraged when appropriate to meet the patient’s personal and clinical needs. The key innovation will be the intelligent orchestration of multiple modalities of care, rather than the individual applications servicing them. Further value will be delivered through technology directly before, after, and within the video call, making the session more efficient for both the provider and the patient, and promoting engagement and continuity after the visit.
Q: How can providers better navigate the digital divide to help vulnerable patient populations participate in virtual care?
SV: Virtual care offerings have historically struggled to engage vulnerable people and underserved communities, in part due to structural barriers to care that was not solved for with technology (e.g. challenges in access to broadband and unlimited data) and in part due to the design of virtual care historically to primarily serve commercially insured patients. As more care shifts to virtual, health systems and government bodies must provide the foundational infrastructure to avoid exacerbating existing disparities in care. Universal broadband access, health equity initiatives, and digital solution redesigns that are culturally competent should be pursued. If these barriers can be overcome, virtual care’s ability to power high quality, lower-cost care could dramatically increase access among underserved populations.