Telehealth is clearly here to stay, and it isn't just COVID behind the trend. Other factors — the move to value-based care, staffing shortages resulting in delayed care, more favorable provider views on the merits of telehealth and increasing consumer preferences for convenience — are all driving a major shift toward a hybrid healthcare model that combines traditional avenues of in-person care with telehealth and technology-based solutions.
In a September Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by AMN Healthcare, Kurt Mosley, vice president, strategic alliances, and Mark Knudsen, head of telehealth technology solutions, both of AMN Healthcare, discussed how hybrid healthcare can help address those challenges and shared insights into what a successful hybrid model should look like.
Four key takeaways were:
- Leave behind the notion of telehealth as a video-only solution. That's what many healthcare systems adopted in a rush during COVID, but to leverage the true potential of telehealth, consider its other capabilities beyond just virtual visits. Telehealth can encompass secure, text-like messaging beyond the capabilities of the patient portal, remote patient monitoring, tailored messaging, risk survey and condition management tools and language interpretation and translation.
- The emerging hybrid care model involving telehealth is a major opportunity to tackle some of healthcare's biggest challenges. Chief among them are care gaps between routine appointments and delayed appointments because of provider unavailability, which can lead to adverse outcomes for the patient's health and for value-based care. "The ability to monitor health and vital signs for not just extremely acute patients, but for the average person, is only getting more powerful," Mr. Knudsen said. "There's a lot of opportunity for the patient to engage more fully with their health, and for the provider to collect and interact with data and provide more proactive care as opposed to reactive care."
- Hybrid care can also help solve staffing problems using flexible staffing models. "With the physician shortage, it's important that we figure out how to provide as much care as possible to as many people as possible," Mr. Knudsen said. Increasingly burned-out providers are demanding more flexibility. Flexible staffing can also lower costs while supporting physician needs, using a team-based, patient-centered approach.
"With COVID, we had such ups and downs in supply and demand," Mr. Mosley said. "Flexible staffing is something that adapts to those changes." One AMN client, a large health system struggling to recruit behavioral healthcare providers, had patients facing delays of more than 550 days for placement. On AMN's advice, they hired three telehealth psychiatrists. Their placement delay shrunk to 58 days.
- An ideal telehealth solution will provide a seamless experience for both patients and provider. The solution needs to offer end-to-end integration with single sign-on and should tie together the in-person and digital experiences into a single, unified workflow. This seamless integration will enable more efficient staffing and operations, help garner provider buy-in and improve the patient experience. It can also improve outcomes related to value-based care, particularly in the costly realm of chronic condition management. Another AMN client, a home healthcare agency, saw a 23 percent reduction in hospital readmissions in the first five months after equipping staff and patients with a secure texting application.
While in-person care remains foundational to medicine, telehealth is not only becoming a pillar in deploying modern healthcare, but it provides an opportunity to improve patient and provider experiences while addressing key business problems by managing resources more flexibly and efficiently.
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