Telehealth is here to stay. Here's how to assess your organization's future usage.

By Jordan Angers

Telehealth is still stabilizing from its massive explosion in 2020, so the decline in utilization makes sense. For most of 2020, telehealth was the only option for receiving and delivering care. As in-person care opened back up and people were ready to return to in-person interactions, it’s natural that some of those telehealth visits would convert to in-person visits. But it’s important to acknowledge that telehealth volumes are still dramatically higher than anything we experienced before Covid-19, even after the decline in 2021. This suggests that telehealth is here to stay in some capacity.

What will the future look like?

The short answer is that it depends on how health care leaders choose to use telehealth over the next year.

We know that telehealth volumes have been the industry’s focus over the past two years. We’ve seen many sources reporting on telehealth as a percentage of total visits and telehealth volumes across specialties. While utilization data is important and a helpful guide for decision-making, we continue to see that organizations recognize value in how they use telehealth rather than how much telehealth they do. Luckily, the explosion of telehealth during Covid-19 gave us data across different use cases to help us understand where telehealth has the biggest impact. For example, it’s clear that telehealth works well for behavioral health in the long-term, not just as an emergency substitute for in-person care.

Tactics for telehealth usage

We encourage you to consider which visits should be virtual rather than how many virtual visits you should be doing. Here are some tactics to consider:

• Use telehealth as a tool to achieve organization-wide goals. Telehealth isn’t a new type of care—it’s a tool that can help organizations improve care delivery and meet strategic goals. Just like any other tool, telehealth won’t be the right tool for every situation. Consider how telehealth can help advance strategic goals such as increasing access to specialists or moving towards value-based care.
• Ask what patients and physicians want from telehealth. You need both parties on board for telehealth to be successful long-term. So, think about where telehealth can provide value to patients and physicians, and how it can improve their experiences of seeking or delivering care.

Of course, there are many competing priorities when it comes to investing in telehealth. And outstanding questions about reimbursement and regulations make prioritizing especially difficult. Here are four questions to help get you started:

• What is our unmet need? What can’t we do and how will telehealth help us meet that need?
• Do we already have something that can do this job? Do we need to consider other telehealth modalities like remote patient monitoring (RPM) or asynchronous capabilities?
• Do we need to build this ourselves, or partner or buy a solution? Do we have enough physicians to staff our telehealth platform, or will we need to outsource to a third-party vendor?
• What the downstream implications of investing in telehealth? How will we reinvent care standards and pathways for telehealth? How will scheduling, clinical documentation, and training and quality requirements need to change?