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Tag: Telemedicine

InTouch Health’s CEO on B2B Telehealth Demand & Post-Covid Virtual Care Market | WTF Health

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

“I never anticipated — and no one did — the level of uptake and the level of scale.”

It says a lot that Joe DeVivo, CEO of Intouch Health, who’s worked with hospitals and health systems on standing up B2B-focused telehealth programs for years (and whose company was acquired by Teladoc Health for $600-million dollars in January) is surprised about the uptake of virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Historically, I look at virtual care as a bell curve,” says Joe. “On one side of that small tail of the bell curve are the virtual care companies. Teladoc dominates that space for D2C. There’s millions of consultations a year, and we’re seeing a subset of that. On the opposite side of the bell curve is high-acuity, and what InTouch has been doing for critical care.”

“This crisis, and the changes in reimbursement, have opened up the middle of that bell curve. The core, everyday transaction of healthcare is now being impacted by virtual care. And the big question that everyone has is, “is this going to stick? Is this a crisis management tool and we’re going to go back to the ways of the past, or is that genie out of the bottle?”

We put Joe on-the-spot with his own question, find out what he thinks it will take to enable the permanent shift to virtual care at-scale, and dig in on how demand for telehealth within hospitals has changed as a result of the pandemic, where its not only being used to expand access to specialists, but has also been adapted into a PPE-hack to help frontline hospital workers distance themselves from infected patients.

And what of working with Teladoc? While waiting for the paperwork to finalize (all on-schedule for the end of Q2 as originally announced), the two have organized a co-selling agreement to be able to “hit the market fast” and bring their “hospital-to-home” end-to-end virtual care offering to those who need it now.

The Tipping Point for Telehealth

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By ALEXA B. KIMBALL MD, MPH

The tipping point for telehealth just happened. Many ways of doing business will change forever after the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, and health care, too, will never be the same. 

Between the release from some HIPAA requirements announced by President Trump this month, shifts in payor policies, and mandated insurance coverage of telehealth visits, innovation and adoption are taking off like wildfire. As patients and outpatient-based physicians hunker down at home, they are rapidly experimenting, and improving the way care is being delivered remotely. 

Our institution, which had no prior program, faced with an imminent shut down of elective activity, developed an enterprise-wide telehealth program in days, rendering hundreds of visits as soon as we launched it. This activity is being replicated all around the country. 

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Blue Cross NC Chief Medical Officer on “Flipping the Switch” To Telehealth at Parity | WTF Health

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

In the early days of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC) stepped up as one of the first health insurance plans to announce reimbursing telehealth visits “at parity” with face-to-face office visits for all providers and specialists. Chief Medical Officer Rahul Rajkumar talks us through the strategy behind that decision to “flip the switch” for telemedicine — which was made in just one meeting (!) – and what metrics and outcomes the Blue plan will be looking at post-pandemic to decide if the switch remains on.

Conversation Highlights:

  • Changing reimbursement policies to cover ALL COVID-19 testing and treatment
  • 6:45 min: The role of virtual care during COVID-19 and reimbursement at parity
  • 11:11 min: How will telehealth be evaluated post-epidemic?
  • 13:58 min: Telehealth innovation, B2B use, remote monitoring (looking to providers to lead the way)
  • 17:25 min: What’s going to happen with healthcare costs in 2021?

For more on how health tech companies in digital health, telehealth, remote monitoring, health data, and more are responding to the COVID-19 crisis, check out the other interviews in this special series at www.wtf.health/covid19.

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 115 | Olive, Bright.md and AristaMD

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, we have a no-nonsense April 1st episode—with deals this time! On Episode 115, Jess asks me about Olive raising $51 million for its AI-enabled revenue cycle management solution, Bright.md raising an $8 million Series C for its asynchronous telemedicine platform, and AristaMD raising $18 million for a different sort of telemedicine, eConsults, which allow primary care physicians to consult with specialists virtually. —Matthew Holt

Telehealth Startup CEO On How Covid-19 Is Changing Telemedicine Use In Hospitals | WTF Health

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Jamey Edwards, CEO of one of the larger in-hospital B2B telehealth startups in the US, Cloudbreak Health, is already seeing changes in the way hospitals are using his company’s telemedicine services in the wake of COVID-19.

From a noted rise in the rate of infectious disease consults, to “quarantine rooms” where telemedicine equipment is cleverly deployed to practice “clinical distancing” to minimize risk to front-line healthcare workers (and also preserve PPE), Jamey talks about what he’s seeing among hospital clinicians and what they seem to need most right now from telehealth providers amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

With changes to licensing regulations, HIPAA policies, and reimbursement changing the very infrastructure around telehealth, will we finally see virtual care become a true part of the healthcare system at-scale?

“One of the hardest things to do in our healthcare system is match cost to acuity,” says Jamey. “I’m not going to say we’ve overvalued the in-person encounter, but we certainly have been very hesitant to step away from it.”

“The fact of the matter is that that’s a bias. And so it’s up to us to look at these biases and say, ‘Well, no. What is the right way to do this?’”

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American Telemedicine Has Gone Viral

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By HANS DUVEFELT, MD

It took a 125 nanometer virus only a few weeks to move American healthcare from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.

This had nothing to do with science or technology and only to a small degree was it due to public interest or demand, which had both been present for decades. It happened this month for one simple reason: Medicare and Medicaid started paying for managing patient care without a face to face encounter.

Surprise! In the regular service industries, businesses either charge for their services or give certain services away for free to build customer loyalty. In healthcare, up until this month, any unreimbursed care or free advice was provided on top of the doctors’ already productivity driven work schedules.

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Telemedicine is a Tool, not a Panacea, to Reach Underserved Communities

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Sam Aptekar
Phuoc Le

By PHUOC LE, MD and SAM APTEKAR

“Kijan ou ye? How are you?” I asked my patient, a fifty-five year-old Haitian-American woman living in Dorchester, Massachusetts. It was 2008. I had been her primary care doctor for two years and was working with her to reduce her blood pressure and cholesterol levels. “Papi mal dok– I’m doing ok doc.” We talked for 15 minutes, reviewed her vital signs and medications, and made a plan. I then electronically transmitted a new prescription to her pharmacy. The encounter was like thousands of others I’d had as a physician, except for one key difference– I was in Rwanda, 7,000 miles away from Dorchester and 6 hours ahead of the East Coast time zone.

At the time, I knew that telemedicine – the practice of providing healthcare without the provider being physically present with the patient – was a resourceful means of working with rural populations that have limited access to healthcare. However, I had no idea that just ten years down the road, many health professionals and policymakers would laud the emerging tech field as the answer to inaccessible healthcare for rural communities. While I’m aware of telemedicine’s promising benefits, I’m certain that it cannot, on its own, solve the most pressing issues that continue to afflict the rural poor and underserved.

https://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/design-supply-chain-media/global-telehealth-market-set-expand-tenfold-2018

Ever since the invention of the telephone, providers have been practicing telemedicine. However, not until the advent of advanced technologies such as high-speed internet, smartphones, and remote-controlled robotic surgery, has the field of telemedicine started to beg the question: “Do we still need in-person interactions between patient and doctor to provide high quality healthcare?” This question is particularly important for patients who live in rural areas, where a chronic shortage of providers has existed for decades.

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Reducing Burnout and Increasing Efficiency with Telepsychiatry

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SPONSORED POST

By PETER YELLOWLEES MD 

Telepsychiatry is now an established form of mental health care. Many studies demonstrate that it meets all appropriate standards of psychiatric care and may be better than in-person consultations for certain groups of patients, such as children, adults with PTSD or anxiety disorders, or those who find it hard to leave their homes. At UC Davis all patients are now offered the option of either seeing their psychiatrist in person, online at home, or in any private setting. Many patients now choose to receive their care in a hybrid manner that can be significantly better than being seen exclusively in the clinic office for numerous reasons.

From the patient’s perspective it is more convenient, allowing them to fit their consultations into their lives, rather than having to take several hours out to travel and attend a clinic. Many patients also find this form of care to be more intimate and less threatening, with the slightly increased “distance” from the therapist allowing them to feel safer talking about stigmatized or embarrassing topics, such as trauma and abuse. We also know from numerous satisfaction studies that patients like being treated using video. In fact some groups, such as children and young adults, prefer this to conventional methods.

What has not been examined scientifically in as much detail is the impact telepsychiatry has on providers, although the latter are voting with their feet. Latest figures suggest that up to 15% of psychiatrists are now using video with their patients  There are numerous advantages for psychiatrists and it is becoming clear that treating patients in a hybrid manner using telepsychiatry, as well as other technologies like messaging and secure email, may be a major response to the problem of physician burnout, making providers both more efficient and clinically effective.

So what are the advantages of telemedicine for mental health providers?

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Learning from CVS – When is telemedicine disruptive, and when is it just…cool technology?

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By REBECCA FOGG

The Theory of Disruptive Innovation, defined by Harvard Business School (HBS) Professor Clayton Christensen in 1997, explains the process by which simple, convenient and affordable solutions become the norm in industries historically characterized by expensive and complicated ones. Examples of disruption include TurboTax tax preparation software, which disrupted accountants, and Netflix, which disrupted retail video stores and is now giving Hollywood film studios a serious run for their money.

According to Christensen, a critical condition of disruption (but not the only one) is an “enabling technology”—an invention or innovation that makes a product or service (or “solution”) more accessible to a wider population in terms of cost, and ease of acquisition and/or use. For instance, innovations making equipment for dialysis cheaper and simpler helped make it possible to administer the treatment in neighborhood clinics, rather than in centralized hospitals, thus disrupting hospital’s share of the dialysis business.

However in an interview in Working Knowledge, the online newsletter highlighting HBS research, marketing Professor Thales Teixeira asserts that it’s not innovative technology that disrupts a market. Rather, it’s companies recognizing and addressing emerging customer needs sooner than incumbents. “…In many industries, both the disrupter and the disrupted had similar technologies and similar amounts of technology,” he points out. “The common pattern was that the majority of customers in those markets had changing needs and wants, and their behavior was changing.”

Well that’s interesting. Does Teixeira’s view on the role of technology in disruption, at least as summarized in the interview, contradict Christensen’s groundbreaking work? Not at all. In fact, Teixeira effectively reinforces an oft-overlooked nuance of the latter: disruption is not just about the innovative solution, no matter how novel, dazzling or slick the technology it may employ. It’s about using the solution to do a job for consumers that makers of incumbent solutions are ignoring—usually in a cheaper, simpler and more accessible way; and maximizing likelihood of success by aligning the innovator’s whole business model toward that end.

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What Do Docs Think About Delivering Care via Telehealth? | Teladoc Provider Dr. Chris Dennis

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

As more and more patients seek care using telehealth, one has to wonder what it’s like for the docs. Dr. Chris Dennis provides behavioral health services via the Teladoc virtual care platform and dishes on the experience. Is the patient-physician relationship the same? How does he benefit from actually seeing his patients in their ‘natural environments’? Mental health services are one area where virtual care use is quickly gaining acceptance, will the trend last? Listen in to find out.

Filmed at HIMSS 2019 in Orlando, Florida, February 2019

Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.

Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.