Keys to advancing telehealth

BOSTON—How to advance telehealth? Make it convenient, said speakers at the 2014 Connected Health Symposium.

One year after vendor American Well System began offering its online telehealth services on mobile devices, it witnessed a 100-fold increase in utilization, according to its CEO, Roy Shoenberg, MD, MPH.

“The reality is that the way people use telehealth services has completed changed,” he said, noting that advancing adoption can be simply “that tweak that makes it a part of the fabric of peoples’ lives.” His company, American Well, is an eight-year old company based in Boston that offers software, services and access to clinic services to both larger delivery systems, like Cleveland Clinic, and smaller provider groups.

Creating a “seamless experience” is part of Wellpoint’s vision of advancing telehealth, said Martin Silverstein, MD, who serves as the company’s executive vice president and chief strategy officer.

“We try to create a seamless experience in telemedicine so that it is in fact fundamentally the same thing as going to a Minute Clinic or physician but it’s wherever they want to do it,” he said. Large employers are very interested in telemedicine, and see the opportunity for increasing productivity and lowering costs, he said. Members that do virtual visits end up in urgent care or in the emergency room less frequently.

Telehealth’s value proposition, he argued, is what will propel telehealth. Also, awareness is critical—and Silverstein predicted that it will grow once utilization increases in a way similar to the Minute Clinics of Walgreens and CVS, for which adoption at first took a while.

Cost transparency also will help. Wellpoint is working with Castlight, a company that provides a cost transparency platform, to help their members make better healthcare purchasing decisions. “When you give consumers information at the right time, they act on it appropriately,” he said.

Anthem expanded a healthcare for all accounts that impacts how care managers and nurses interact with members. When the patient calls in, a voice recognition system brings information into the system so the nurse doesn’t have to spend time looking it up. “It accelerates the experience members have over the phone.”

Mercy Health—a Missouri system that currently encompasses 22 hospitals, more than 300 ambulatory sites and 2,000 integrated physicians—has been a long time utilizer of telehealth, well before HITECH funding came along.

“We started 10 years ago and invested heavily in the capability. We did not wait for the industry,” said Shannon Sock, Mercy Health executive vice president.

For him, driving telehealth is less about consumers or payers and more about progress on the provider side. There must be a mindset that connectivity to patients is key to growing an organization and serving a larger population. As such, providers should see it as part of their job, and not something that requires additional payment or special treatment.

Establishing relationships based on trust and promoting convenience and simplicity are the keys to promoting telehealth, weighed in Neil Evans, MD, co-director of connected health at the Department of Veterans Affairs. More than 12 percent of all patients enrolled in the agency’s portal, Myhealthyvet, receive some form of telehealth during the year.

Trust-based relationships are necessary “so when the tools are marketed, [patients] are more likely to accept it.” Also, it’s vital for physicians to personally invite their patients to participate in a telehealth program. “That increases adoption tremendously.”

Making telehealth simple is another way to “reduce barriers to entry,” he added.