How to Boost Virtual Care Access, Eliminate Demographic Barriers
Virtual care access is important for individuals who require mental and behavioral healthcare or who have trouble traveling to in-person care, but barriers still impede widespread access.
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- Despite a surge in virtual care utilization, virtual care access remains challenging for many individuals across the US, particularly due to cultural and geographic barriers.
Adam Hornung, executive director of telehealth operations at Intermountain Healthcare, shared with Healthcare Strategies how his organization has been working to assess and address barriers to Intermountain Healthcare’s virtual care services.
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“I'm really proud to be able to partner with them to really ask some tough questions and take a really good look in the mirror to say, ‘Hey, are we as accessible as we should be?’ And the answer today is: no, we’ve got work to do,” Hornung acknowledged.
“But I'm happy to say that the work is ongoing, that we're aware of it. We're talking to patients, we're talking to community leaders about what it is that we can do to make sure that we give everybody the opportunity to ask access the care that they need.”
At the center of addressing those questions is Intermountain Healthcare’s community health team. Intermountain Healthcare hosts patient panels that allow the organization to converse with the community about how Intermountain Healthcare can better serve them and close care gaps.
Some of the recommendations from the patient panels have aligned with the industry-wide conversation about reducing care disparities in virtual care, such as offering access to virtual care in languages other than English.
Additionally, patient panels have helped inform Intermountain Healthcare about how mental and behavioral healthcare—services that are frequently delivered through virtual care—can better fit into different cultural perspectives around mental and behavioral health.
“In the spirit of really coming together and taking care of a population, it’s critically important for us to understand as we go to the table with these folks that we don't have all of the answers. They will have all the answers in terms of how we ought to be serving them. And it's really incumbent upon us to listen and really execute against the things that we learn with them,” Hornung explained.
Hornung noted that one of the biggest challenges in addressing barriers to virtual care access is identifying individuals who are facing barriers. He indicated that knowing a patient’s zip code can help narrow down the patients who might have challenges accessing virtual care.
