The sudden pivot from “nice-to-have” to baseline expectation

The rapid embrace of telehealth in the wake of Covid-19 is simply astonishing. In less than one month, provider practices shifted from doing almost no virtual visits to doing only virtual visits. Hospitals that did hundreds of visits in all of 2019 are now doing that many every hour.

Telehealth won’t be the only way to access care in the future, but it will be a much more commonplace one. For the first time, telehealth has been tested at scale across the industry by patients, providers, and payers. Advisory Board has heard many of these health care stakeholders echo CMS administrator Seema Verma’s recent comment on telehealth’s sudden and durable importance to the industry: “There’s absolutely no going back.”