Challenges, Opportunities for Telehealth Growth Post-Coronavirus
The coronavirus pandemic has contributed to strong telehealth growth, but physician groups, hospitals, and health systems continue to face barriers to expanding telehealth utilization.
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- Telehealth growth could continue to improve access to care after the coronavirus pandemic, but policymakers and the healthcare industry will have to address certain barriers to telehealth to make that ideal a reality, a recent Insights report revealed.
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When providers restricted access to in-person care sites due to the pandemic, many patients and providers turned to telehealth and virtual care solutions, causing an explosion in telehealth utilization.
As care routines return to normal, many providers expect to continue utilizing telehealth. Participants in Xtelligent Healthcare Media’s Insights report responded almost unanimously that they would continue to utilize telehealth.
“A lot of providers said that telehealth was actually going to have a positive impact on their revenue,” Emily Sokol, director of research at Xtelligent Healthcare Media, told Healthcare Strategies. “We didn’t ask specifically but, if I had to guess, I would say part of that is because you’re able to see more patients.”
While providers were aligned on this point, they diverged when it came to the most significant challenges in telehealth.
“When we did a separate analysis breaking down our physician practices—so our primary care physicians’ offices, specialty behavioral health facilities—and we compared those with the hospitals and health systems, there was a difference in that the provider groups still agreed that tech infrastructure was the biggest challenge but your hospitals and health systems actually said provider and physician buy-in was the biggest challenge to successful telehealth,” Sokol noted.
Sokol reasoned that this difference was in part due to size. Larger hospitals and health systems have more staff that they can dedicate to analytics, reimbursement, and more. In a physician practice, however, the staff is smaller and oriented around a single focus, such as neurology, cardiology, or physical therapy.
In order for a small practice to accomplish its goals, the providers have to align. In a bigger system, however, with a larger and more diverse clinical staff, it is harder to implement policies that will receive unanimous staff acceptance.
As providers work through these challenges, it will be crucial for policymakers to remove any regulatory barriers to telehealth expansion, Sokol added.
“The louder, the cry for ‘telehealth works,’ the harder it's going to be for policymakers to ignore it,” said Sokol. “Provider organizations, researchers, and even payers can start to build that evidence base that really supports the funding for telehealth so that, from a policy perspective, you can't argue with the numbers.”
