Turning telehealth into a sustaining innovation instead of a pandemic-induced afterthought
The urgency to innovate care delivery heightened during the COVID pandemic, and virtual care shouldn’t be an afterthought now.
Consumers love telehealth for its convenience, with 61 percent of those who used it during the pandemic stating they would prefer access to both digital and in-person care services in the future.
However, despite telehealth’s ascent, most healthcare providers continue to use the same inefficient infrastructure cobbled together on the backend to support it. These same providers face challenges like never before, from rising competition to massive financial burdens and worsening staffing shortages. It’s no wonder only 13 percent of health systems consider themselves ahead of the pace of change consumers wish to see. The pressure to innovate has never been more intense.
The time has come for health systems to re-evaluate the backend processes they are using to ensure the right digital care delivery models and practices are in place. How can improved technology and processes help drive more efficiency, optimize ROI and ultimately improve patient and provider satisfaction?
Accurate forecasts unlock efficiency
With the rapid surge in virtual care demand, predicting appointment volumes for future virtual care visits can be a complex challenge for health systems without access to the right data to inform decision-making.
Managing workforce requirements for a virtual care clinic, particularly one handling episodic care, requires planning for patient growth, understanding the needs of the population and ongoing staffing management and long-term planning.
Leveraging visit volume data to uncover patterns and make informed decisions expedites patient wait times and drives greater provider efficiency by enabling more accurate forecasting and staffing decisions.
Know patients’ expectations
In the six plus years I spent operating a virtual care clinic at 98point6, we saw that patient satisfaction, regardless of care modality, does not materially change until a patient waits more than 30 minutes.
While it’s true that nobody likes to wait, many health systems wrongly assume patients are unwilling to wait more than a few minutes for a virtual visit. Costs for providers, planning tools and support staff increase significantly when they attempt to provide staff for visits with wait times of less than two minutes, compared with less than 30 minutes.
In our experience, patient satisfaction did not drop with longer wait times as long as the care quality remained high. The patient experience of waiting for a visit virtually vs. in a brick-and-mortar setting is vastly different. Balancing patient expectations with budget realities goes a long way towards helping to manage operating costs.
Let behavior remove care barriers
Human behavior is a key indicator of how technology innovations will succeed or fail. For example, by meeting patients how and where they want — like through a text-based app — health systems can reduce friction and get people more engaged with their health. This ultimately improves clinical workflows, downstream care coordination and both the patient and provider experience.
Successful virtual and hybrid care programs depend on meaningful data that can be measured and analyzed to gain insights. For many organizations, however, their data often does not flow among varying platforms and providers in a cohesive or standardized way, leading to missed opportunities around clinical and operational decision making and program optimization.
Having a data-driven platform enables access to insights that otherwise are lost, and helps providers make data-driven decisions to improve patient care.
Serving patients holistically
Care models that bring together digitally enabled advanced integration, care coordination and care navigation help health systems more effectively plan patient care. This requires seamless integration with CRMs, call centers and other digital tools.
Platforms capable of creating personalized experiences for patients by routing them to the right specialist at the right time have come a long way from the point solutions that were rapidly adopted at the onset of lockdowns and other social distancing measures. The more healthcare providers can erase the lines between systems and offer patients a clear path to care, the better their experience and outcomes will be, both in the short and long term.
As AI technology has improved, historical data patterns can be used to mimic the types of in-person conversations patients value with providers, which, in turn, reduces variability in care. Virtual care, powered by AI, provides additional scaffolding and oversight to reduce clinical variability and provide informed insights. Importantly, these same AI systems can significantly reduce documentation burden for the provider by automating large sections of the virtual visit.
Hire wisely
Not all clinicians will be interested in providing virtual patient care. If a healthcare organization is going to invest the time and cost to license a clinician for multiple jurisdictions, they would be wise to find out who is best suited for the job and aligned with their hybrid care strategy.
Out of necessity, virtual care was propelled to the mainstream during the pandemic. Now, it’s time to move the discussion beyond access and convenience toward issues of quality and integration. It’s time to find the long-term fit for digital care in our healthcare ecosystem.
Providers now have a variety of telehealth infrastructure models to choose from, each with varying degrees of support to the teams charged with delivering care. The investments made today will determine how providers compete in an increasingly crowded and undifferentiated marketplace and lay the foundation for further growth and transformation. The benefits of a well-designed digital care model are clear and within reach, if care organizations choose to take advantage of them.
Brad Younggren, MD, is chief medical officer and president of Care Innovation, 98point6 Technologies