Although telehealth has been around for a long time, the pandemic made it newly relevant. Now, after the pandemic, the use cases for telehealth and virtual care continue to expand, transforming the way that healthcare is delivered and producing positive results. As this transformation occurs, organizations are taking a closer look at how to integrate telehealth into their strategies and operations.
During a Becker's Healthcare podcast, Matt Brown, Vice President of Telehealth at CHG Healthcare, discussed the current state of telehealth and virtual care and described what's on the horizon.
Four key takeaways were:
- In the wake of COVID-19, use cases for telehealth have exploded. CHG Healthcare supports a broad mix of providers working in different virtual settings. Over the past year, the company has seen telehealth and virtual care move into many medical subspecialties.
"What might surprise people is how deep telehealth and virtual care are integrating into specialty areas where in the past we didn't think there was a use case for telehealth," Mr. Brown said. "Our top five settings for telehealth include oncology, cardiology and maternal fetal medicine."
In addition to subspecialties, telehealth and virtual care are playing a central role in emerging care models like hospital-at-home programs and remote patient monitoring, which are pushing healthcare organizations into remote settings.
- Telehealth is increasing patient engagement and satisfaction. CHG Healthcare has a client that is very focused on traditional population health management. To better serve its underserved and lower-income populations who are often hard to reach, this organization launched a telehealth-first strategy. Patient engagement rates increased from around 15 percent to almost 45 percent.
"If you follow value-based care models, that's a pretty big movement upward," Mr. Brown said. "The organization was able to achieve this just by implementing a holistic telehealth strategy. The boost in patient engagement also increased the Star ratings for the plans they were supporting."
- Virtual care also reduces healthcare employee burnout. Virtual care solutions enable nurses to remotely manage floors and engage in rounding. "A recent presentation by New York Presbyterian showed how they used virtual care to reduce burnout and turnover for their entire nursing staff from around 32 percent to 12 percent," Mr. Brown said.
- Pending legislation related to virtual care reimbursement will influence the future of telehealth. Health systems are lobbying lawmakers to extend reimbursement policies for telehealth and virtual care that were driven by the pandemic. Successful performance-based care programs that use telehealth will also buoy the case for extending reimbursement measures.
"Everyone expects this to happen, and with that, we'll see a continuation of standard practices around virtual care. It would also mean that people will lean more heavily into telehealth as a long-term strategy that isn't going away," Mr. Brown said.
Looking ahead, it appears that consumers are shifting to an omnichannel healthcare experience where they flow seamlessly between in-person office visits and virtual visits. "This will continue to become a normal part of how we engage with providers and health systems, just as we do in other industries," Mr. Brown said. "Healthcare is just a bit slower to catch up."