The following is a guest article by Ashley Berube, Senior Data Analyst Manager at Definitive Healthcare.
Each year, Telehealth Awareness Week sparks critical conversations surrounding the key role that telehealth and virtual care now play in the delivery of healthcare services.
We recently participated in a compelling roundtable discussion with our friends at Covenant Health and Hicuity Health. Using healthcare commercial intelligence gathered from the Definitive Healthcare platform, we examined recent trends in telehealth and explored new ways that providers can harness the technology to improve patient outcomes.
I’ll be digging into some of the biggest insights below, but you can watch the webinar, Telehealth’s Trajectory – Provider Perspectives on the Future, for the full discussion.
1. COVID-19 was the catalyst for telehealth’s rise
It’s hard to talk about telehealth without first mentioning COVID-19.
It’s old news to say that the pandemic dramatically altered every facet of daily life—and the ways providers engaged with their patients were caught in a particularly dire situation. The problem was two-fold:
- First, in-person doctor visits dropped due to lockdown measures, social distancing guidelines, and a sweeping discomfort with meeting in public spaces. But the need to receive care didn’t just disappear, and healthcare providers needed to deploy new ways to help patients.
- Second, the pandemic overwhelmed healthcare organizations’ ability to treat patients. Resources were strained, physicians suffered burnout, and frontline health workers faced significant risk.
Additionally, with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) broadening access to telehealth services in March 2020, telehealth usage skyrocketed. According to a McKinsey report, telehealth claims rose to more than 70 million by April 2020.
While healthcare providers have been championing the benefits of telehealth and other virtual care services for years prior to the pandemic, it was COVID-19 that served as the trigger for its rapid deployment and staggering growth. We can see that illustrated in the graph below.
We can see a slight but steady increase in patient volumes year-over-year from 2016 to 2019, hovering just under 10 million encounters. Come 2020, and telehealth procedures increased 2400%. While growth has slowed in 2021 for reasons we will investigate shortly, telehealth encounters in 2021 are expected to be 1906% greater than 2019 volumes.
Dr. Ram Srinivasan, CMO of Hicuity Health, sums it up best:. “Telemedicine is medicine. You still have all the information you need to treat your patient and interact with them. I see COVID-19 as the catalyst for that realization. There are so many people who need access to care, and telemedicine can be used to bridge the gap.”
2. Telehealth volume is plateauing at around 9 million per month
While nine million telehealth encounters each month is still significant, it marks a steady decline in growth from 2020, which we can see below.
Over time, it makes sense to see a dip in volume as more people become vaccinated, lockdowns are lifted and social distancing guidelines and mask mandates are relaxed. The world has started to adapt to the seismic shakeup of the pandemic, and technology is pioneering a hybrid model of work, learning, and healthcare.
This trend raises interesting questions surrounding the role that telehealth may play in the future of care. And while it may be too early to predict what the future may hold, we can speculate how physicians will leverage telehealth and remote patient monitoring tools in the hybrid health world.
We explore the answers to these questions in our blog post on how patients are using telehealth to treat their conditions. To summarize: telehealth may be better suited to treat patients with conditions that don’t require complex devices for diagnosis, skilled technicians or surgical procedures. Instead, telehealth may play a support role in the physician’s toolkit as one component of a provider’s strategy.
Dr. Mandy Halford, SVP and CMIO of Covenant Health, predicts that patients will be a driving force behind the continued use of telehealth in the future.
“As we think about our patients and ourselves, we all want easily accessible, high-quality, affordable care,” Dr Halfword says. “And we need that to be available 24/7 and from the convenience of our home or wherever we may be. I do believe the consumer will push for telehealth to be a long-standing item and push providers to make sure telehealth is part of their strategic plan and integrated into the healthcare delivery model.”
3. The nation’s healthcare workers—particularly women—are at risk of burnout
COVID-19 has exposed many challenges in the U.S. healthcare system. Provider burnout is one of the most important problems that has bubbled to the surface.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality defines provider burnout as a long-term stress reaction marked by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and a lack of sense of personal achievement. It’s not a new phenomenon, but the pandemic has pushed the nation’s healthcare workers to their limit. From a recent Medscape survey of 12,000 physicians, about 42% of providers said they’re experiencing burnout.
Below we have a chart of the percentage of providers experiencing burnout.
Using information from another 2021 Medscape report, we took a look at 30 healthcare specialties at risk for burnout. The specialties ranked highest—those experiencing the most burnout—are critical care, rheumatology, infectious diseases, urology, and pulmonary medicine. We can also see the specialties studied in the report said to experience the least burnout—otolaryngology, orthopedics, oncology, plastic surgery and dermatology. And according to the data, 51% of women physicians are reporting feelings of burnout.
So how can providers use telehealth to alleviate burnout?
Dr. Halford explains that the integration of a tele-ICU program has proven effective in lessening the burden of hospitalists, and specifically those who work night shifts, while they work. Dr. Halford shares that nocturnists are oftentimes cross-covering many hospital floors, all the while focusing on readmissions and patients coming in from the emergency room. The introduction of a tele-ICU allows for a skilled intensivist to manage calls from critical care patients, making it easier to provide the right evidence-based practice to patients while lessening the load across the team.
4. Telehealth could lower staffing shortage rates
Staffing shortages and burnout are two closely interwoven problems that hinder a healthcare provider’s ability to deliver quality care to their patients.
Using data from the National Provider Identifier (NPI) registry and our own database, we determined the healthcare specialties experiencing the highest numbers of provider dropout in the graph below.
Dr. Srinivasan hopes staffing shortages could be addressed by telehealth services, remote patient monitoring and other virtual care options. For nurses and nurse practitioners, which has lost 2,705 members, he predicts could benefit greatly from leveraging telehealth tools.
“Folks get overwhelmed,” Dr. Srinivasan says. “But I believe we can put virtual health technology and remote monitoring technology in the hands of experienced nurses in a supporting role. Knowing that there is another person you can call to work with you, be in your corner, look at your patient and care for them with objective data can help minimize burnout and staffing shortages.”
5. Reducing avoidable readmissions is possible
Reducing readmissions has long been a goal of providers because it represents an opportunity to lower health care costs, improve care quality and increase patient satisfaction. For both Dr. Halford and Dr. Srinivasan, they see telehealth and digital technologies as key to addressing this problem.
The Medicare 30-day hospital readmission rate has hovered around 18% for the past five years, a point of disappointment for Dr. Halford. She argues that telehealth can be a game-changer in this area, providing the framework to coordinate patient care and as a tool to navigate them through their entire care journey. Robust communications systems and remote patient monitoring tools can offer more structure to how a patient receives care, giving the physician more opportunities to improve their health after they’ve been discharged.
Dr. Srinivasan agrees, believing that telehealth can be used to help patients overcome the significant hurdles that present themselves once medication has been delivered. He argues that there is only so much time a physician has to explain medication directions or answer questions. It’s often left to the patient to interpret or go to another source other than their doctor to search for answers. This is where telehealth can step in. Telehealth can coordinate with patients to establish follow-ups, used to offer an open space where the patient can ask questions or clarify directions from their physician. This way, the healthcare provider can detect and resolve issues before they become readmissions.
There’s one thing for sure: telehealth is vital to care delivery
Telehealth has transformed the way patients access care and connect with their providers. Instead of being a catch-all solution, however, Dr. Srinivasan and Dr. Halford agree that telehealth is best served integrated into a broad healthcare strategy.
How can hospitals and health systems best take advantage of telehealth technology? By leveraging healthcare commercial intelligence to gain a better understanding of your market, patient populations and physicians.
Learn more about how healthcare commercial intelligence can help you navigate the complex healthcare landscape and make the most out of telehealth.
About Ashley Berube
Ashley brings over seven years of experience from the healthcare data and analytics field to her position as a Senior Data Analyst Manager at Definitive Healthcare. She leads a team of client-facing data analysts to deliver on providing actionable insights in custom reports. You can watch the webinar, Telehealth’s Trajectory – Provider Perspectives on the Future here for on-demand.
