Covid-19 has played a key role in accelerating digital health adoption for many years, with the proliferation of telehealth at the forefront.
According to McKinsey Report, telehealth utilization for office visits and outpatient care increased 78x between February 2020 and April 2020, as patients, providers and payers seek to navigate healthcare when in-person visits are no longer an option security provided. According to the same report, telehealth stabilized at 13% to 17% of all visits in early 2021, across specialties. However, this is just the beginning of the adoption of telehealth and the first step towards the future of healthcare experience.
A large part of this transition will be in the primary care physician’s office. While PCPs may not account for a significant portion of healthcare spending, they are critical in patient engagement, triage, diagnosis, and ongoing support. They are often the first point of contact and one of the most trusted members of the healthcare ecosystem. This enables them to provide one of the most important and difficult services in the field – care coordination.
Care coordination has always faced two major obstacles: the physical limitations of patients and the accessibility of actionable, comprehensive data. Physical constraints can be severe (see long travel times for experts, fragmented supplier network) or subtle (inability to access reliable transport).
Telehealth removes physical barriers, as patients can now see a PCP in the morning, write a prescription and mail the medication to their home, then follow up with a specialist in another zip code in the afternoon for further diagnosis. Conditions that may have worsened or worsened with travel and time may now have a treatment plan on the same day. The second hurdle is the effective sharing of actionable, comprehensive data by caregivers with each other, a more ambitious task that will be explored further below.
With virtual caregivers prescribing, scheduling tests, referring specialists and monitoring patients remotely, the pandemic has made many consumers, patients and providers aware of what can be moved out of the doctor’s office. These trends will continue to accelerate as larger, slower-moving parts of healthcare infrastructure figure out how to integrate new workflows and processes. Here are some of the developments we are most excited about.
proper care
A virtual engagement model will allow physicians to operate on top of their licensure while expanding their reach and deepening engagement.According to Deloitte Reportdoctors estimate that 30% of their current work could be done by non-physicians and 18% could be automated.
Telehealth allows the appropriate professional (CAN, LPN, RN, or social worker) to take some of the burden off the doctor by providing effective triage and care, while still being able to escalate to specialist in real-time when needed. This will be the basis for making mobile, near-field and field clinic models more functional, efficient and economically viable. We see companies like Radish, Remedy, Hamilton Health Box, and Medbar leveraging telehealth to iterate on hybrid in-person/virtual care economic models and are optimistic about the resurgence of employer-supported, lean, and flexible clinics.
Likewise, virtual care allows physicians to do more follow-up, support, and care management without the typical cost of time.
last mile care delivery
When the pandemic began, serving patients at home went from convenience to necessity. While many people are able and willing to return to the office, the majority of the medical at-risk community (those with comorbidities, limited transportation, limited physical activity) will benefit greatly from the changes brought about by virtual and telehealth care.
Companies like Heal, Ready Responders, MedArrive, and Axle Health are taking different approaches to accomplishing the same goal—deploying field personnel to meet with patients. The ability to receive care outside of a doctor’s office has the potential to greatly improve ease of care, adherence to treatment, and ultimately health care outcomes.
We expect this trend to continue to expand and apply to a broad range of healthcare support, such as laboratory and diagnostics.
data ecosystem
We believe hybrid and virtual engagement will significantly improve the relevance and actionability of patient medical, health and contextual information. According to the same Deloitte report, two-thirds (65%) of physicians expect that within five to ten years, it will become standard practice for consumers to own and control their health data.
While policy and technical challenges make this forecast optimistic, there is no doubt that we will see more data that influences nursing decisions. Providing physicians with holistic medical records from multiple sources and interpreting them in the context of nonclinical data will help provide more timely, engaging, and effective care.
There are different ways to increase the flow of data among healthcare stakeholders. The first step, mastered by Epic and Cerner some time ago, is digital collection and aggregation within a single network or ecosystem. Hospitals can talk to providers who can talk to payers. However, this creates “walled gardens” that work for some but inaccessible for many. Additionally, patients cannot travel with this information. It’s effectively siloed, and some of the most innovative healthcare companies have to start from the ground up to recruit new patients.
Today, companies like Redox are connecting different stakeholders, while companies like Human API and Moxe are laying the groundwork for leaner digital pipelines in healthcare infrastructure. The most ambitious approaches either involve general-purpose aggregations, such as that of Health Gorilla, which is producing a unique, secure data lake of health information, or companies like Seqster and Patientory, which aim for true mobility by integrating Power back to patients.
All of these approaches are designed to make care more effective, integrate with caregiver engagement, and increase communication and reduce wasted time and effort throughout the healthcare system.
Photo: elenabs, Getty Images
