Carl Reuterskiöld is the CEO at Qbtech.
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Telemedicine is not a new concept. Since the late 1960s, it has supported NASA’s astronauts aboard space missions and gained pervasive usage as the internet became more universally available in the 1980s. In March 2020, the industry received a momentous boost as in-person healthcare visits were stopped in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, deluging the entire vertical with a decade’s worth of telehealth adoption virtually overnight.
Consider the numbers: Only 6% of chronic condition management visits and 5% of primary care were performed through telehealth pre-Covid, according to data from Statista. The same numbers shot up to 41% and 45%, respectively—an immense wave of adoption as doctors and patients were forced to connect in a digital world.
The numbers for Qbtech’s customers show the same story, but from a patient perspective: In June 2020, in-clinic customers had only 15% of normal patient volumes, whereas telehealth customers were operating at normal or increased levels throughout the pandemic. In-clinic customers are even today at significantly lower levels than pre-Covid.
An enormous number of ADHD patients have, instead of still waiting for care, been helped and today live a better life thanks to telemedicine.
You could perhaps think that healthcare would go back to old working methods when restrictions were lifted? While they decreased slightly, insurance claims for telehealth trended only slightly downward, stabilizing at a rate 38 times higher than the pre-Covid era, per McKinsey. Altogether, the emergence of the health tech/telehealth field spells a significant opportunity for tech companies and healthcare providers alike to reinvent care models that improve access, outcomes and affordability.
Much of the best in telehealth is still to come, but patients have little interest in returning to the old system in this early era. The benefits for the patient are too compelling: less time spent on appointments, significant ease of access, reduced travel costs, improved clinical processes and at-home privacy.
Nowhere are these benefits felt more acutely than in mental health care, which was the most adopted style of telehealth across the care landscape, according to the McKinsey & Co. report. An online visit with a therapist to treat anxiety symptoms is more beneficial when scheduled in real-time when a patient is most in need of services. It’s easier for those struggling with depression to arrive at a meeting with just a few clicks rather than traversing across town.
So, is the in-clinic visit dead? No—there will always be a place for certain activities, taking blood samples, testing hearing and heart rates and other biological or biometric collections. There will also be a need to meet your doctor face to face. However, providers need to challenge their processes and determine how each part can best be solved. How can we, for example, collect data for the assessment? Should someone drive to a clinic to answer simple interview questions or perform rating scale answers when this can easily and effectively be done remotely? Should we offer medical devices for remote treatment monitoring instead of having to call patients?
The future model, in my opinion, is a blended one that will merge the advantages of both.
The Impact Of Telehealth On Providers
While benefits are prevalent for patients, the same is not always so easy to see for providers. Many things are reducing the speed of transformation. Staff retention and high patient loads are challenges many providers experience, affecting the ability to perform change processes. Limited IT and patient management systems and possibilities to integrate data flows are others. Lower reimbursement levels for telehealth are a third.
In addition, several areas of telehealth lack outcome-based studies demonstrating the benefits. The main advantages have, according to AHRQ, so far been seen in acute and chronic care with a focus on remote monitoring, communicating and counseling with chronic patients as well as psychotherapy. Additional research is needed before more aspects of telehealth can be seen as “evidence-based” that should be adopted.
These obstacles to change will be addressed. Better IT systems built on established standards and integration of off-the-shelf solutions will reduce workloads (too many systems today are custom-made and, over time, lose their advantages and then mainly create barriers to change), and reimbursement levels are already changing. With the enormous growth of telehealth visits and the subsequent increase in data, I am sure that the scientific gap will also be closed.
The future of telemedicine is bright. We will see an explosion of new telehealth solutions, with seamless integration between health tech and medtech for all patient groups. The emergence of medical device-grade wearables and apps will further drive this growth. The healthcare system is facing one of the most remarkable changes in many, many years—building a new model for healthcare, with patients and providers jointly sharing and improving clinical processes and outcomes.
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