Home Health Care  5 tips for creating value in your telehealth strategy

 5 tips for creating value in your telehealth strategy

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Hospitals, doctors and other health care providers seeking an edge in today’s highly competitive healthcare environment would do well to consider a smart telehealth strategy.

Telehealth is an extremely broad category. It encompasses everything from managing complex, high-risk conditions like stroke through remote monitoring and consultation, to providing high-quality, “on demand” convenience care — or virtual care — for a range of acute, episodic and non-emergent conditions in an effective, rapid and cost-effective manner. Opportunities abound to create and capture value for health systems and their patients. Telehealth services hold the promise of unlocking that value, and now is an excellent time to think about integrating them into your practice.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to developing a telehealth strategy. While one system may be struggling with access issues, another may face the challenge of serving a specific population group or demographic. The right solution with a tuned operational plan behind it can solve either of those issues. It starts with taking an inventory of the pain points you want to solve for. Also helpful: stop thinking in terms of return on investment or revenue created, and instead begin thinking about the value created by your telehealth strategy and virtual care solutions. There are many different ways to create value, but you’ll have to decide on the right mix for your particular needs.

A smart telehealth strategy entails a comprehensive set of solutions — what I call a “ladder of care.” This could include options such as self-triage, nurse advice and asynchronous virtual care for common ambulatory conditions. For higher-acuity issues it could include video visits. In-person visits would be reserved for conditions where multiple co-morbidities exist (diabetes and flu, for instance), or when a physical procedure is required (such as wart removal).

How do you unlock value in your ladder of care? Below are five important points to consider as you make a value case for your smart telehealth strategy.

Valuing access and capacity in your system
Asynchronous virtual care visits can take less than two minutes of provider time, and can be delivered from a smartphone with even a 3G connection, from wherever the provider happens to be. One full-time equivalent of physician or APC capacity can deliver more than 20,000 of these virtual visits per year. Compare that with 2,000 20-minute in-person or video visits for an in-clinic provider. This approach also attracts new patients and retains existing ones, which in turn drives downstream revenue and adds to your brand bank, building loyalty and positive word of mouth through innovation and patient-centered service delivery. 

Avoiding provider burnout
Burnout is real. A ladder-of-care approach ameliorates burnout by giving providers time to focus on higher-acuity patients (and generate associated reimbursement) in clinic and top-of-license practice. And if the telehealth solution can automatically generate a chart-ready SOAP note, that dramatically cuts down on clerical work. Virtual visits also facilitate the delivery of care from outside the clinic walls. If doctors can deliver care from, say, the sidelines of their kids’ soccer game, they won’t have to trade family time for in-clinic hours — another remedy for burnout.

Unlocking value downstream and in preventative care
The value created pays dividends at the system, clinician and patient levels of the healthcare ecosystem. At the system level, in a FFS (fee-for-service) world, a smart telehealth strategy can unlock downstream revenue through both patient acquisition and retention. In a capitated model, it helps keep the patient population healthy while preventing minor ailments from becoming major ones due to a lack of treatment or access.

Eliminating fixed costs
A smart telehealth model can help cut your losses on primary care while also shifting fixed costs to variable costs. Instead of building or leasing and outfitting a two-clinician clinic, you could instead spend a fraction of the cost to provide a far more efficient usage basis. Integrating the staffing of your virtual care solution with existing retail and urgent care efforts would help fill the more than 30 percent of idle provider time that’s all too common in those settings. 

Putting humans at the center of care
For patients, there are savings in time, money and more. Patients regain the hours it takes to schedule, wait for and be evaluated by a physician, also avoiding lost wages, childcare costs if they have to visit the doctor, and so on. Telehealth patients report getting healthier sooner, recovering 1.5 days faster, according to research from Bright.md. And for clinicians, a virtual visit can turn a 20-minute low-acuity visit into a higher-value visit with a patient who really needs it.

The barriers to telehealth are quickly falling. According to a 2016 Medscape study, both patients and physicians have improved their attitudes when it comes to embracing telehealth, with nearly two-thirds of patients surveyed expressing comfort in remote visits, diagnoses and treatment plans. Add to that an increased availability of telehealth services from providers, and a growing sense of patient trust vis-à-vis privacy and security issues. And with so many tech companies turning their focus to healthcare, many of the technology challenges associated with telehealth (bandwidth, availability, etc.) are a thing of the past.

This is no time for hospitals and doctors to retreat into traditional, friction-bound approaches to healthcare delivery. Your patients are already moving to a technology-enabled future of on-demand access to timely, convenient care. Finding new ways to extract the value of your telehealth strategy could be your ticket to join them — and ride the next wave of patients and value-creation opportunities.

Photo: CherriesJD, Getty Images

 

 

 

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