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Despite the myriad benefits, including increased patient engagement, telehealth remains an option, not an imperative. As a result, “we are still underperforming as an industry compared to the promises made and the vision we’ve spun,” said Joseph Kvedar, MD. In this piece he examines why that’s the case and how healthcare can turn the tide.
With the right strategy and partnerships in place, there’s a way to “address the health system’s key challenges around capacity constraints while emphasizing patient comfort and privacy,” said Heather O’Sullivan, President of the Healthcare at Home Division at Mass General Brigham. In a recent interview, she talked about what it takes to break with tradition and establish a new model for care delivery.
The key with digital therapeutics isn’t to design processes in a bubble, but rather, to “look at your stakeholders, including patients, and ask, ‘how can we leverage this technology together? What problem are we trying to solve?” said Joe Diver, CIO at Holyoke Medical Center.
Rather than comparing telehealth services to office visits in terms of data collection – which is future – perhaps we should focus on integrating virtual care into the overall care picture, said Dr. Joe Kvedar in this piece. “It is time for telehealth to sit at the grownup’s table and be treated like an honest service.
By laying a solid data foundation and leveraging tools like virtual triage, healthcare organizations can take significant steps toward providing equitable care, according to Renee Broadbent. In this piece, she talks about the progress SoNE Health has made, and what still needs to happen.
Through partnerships with health systems, payers, medical device companies, and academic medical centers, Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect aims to find better ways to diagnose, treat, and prevent disease, according to John Halamka, MD. How? “By connecting clinical data through a federated, secure architecture.”
Building engagement tools in a way that “surfaces through the care team” is a critical goal for Ashis Barad, MD, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Allegheny Health Network. But it can’t be “built in a way that’s just adding burden to the care teams by having more alerts put in front of them,” he said in this interview.
If telehealth can consistency provide a convenient virtual environment, as well as a clinical workflow that identifies which patients and conditions are appropriate for telehealth services, it’s far more likely to be able to compete with in-person care, according to Joseph Kvedar, MD, Senior Advisor, at the MGH Center for Innovation.
Taking economics out of the picture, the value proposition that tips the scales for telehealth is quality, according to Joseph Kvedar, MD, who cites examples where “we can extend access, provide patient convenience, and do so at a higher quality than in-person.”
“There’s no longer going to be a distinction among acute, ambulatory and virtual; it’s going to be one care ecosystem,” said Hank Capps, MD, in a recent podcast. And that means the ability to be nimble and shift “is going to be really important.”
