Healthcare providers are finally joining the world of telemedicine

A survey conducted by KPMG analyzed the telemedicine rates of adoption in healthcare systems and found that both payers and managed care organizations have interest in the adoption of this technology to help lower the costs of care and have started offering the service as a part of their benefits packages, reports ModernMedicine.  

A quarter of healthcare providers have virtual care programs, comprising of telehealth and telemedicine, that are classified as sustainable while 35 percent of providers have yet to launch a virtual care program. 40 percent of healthcare providers surveyed were in the first stages of implementing this technology or in the early investment stages with fewer than three full-time employees engaged in telemedicine-telehealth.

The biggest drivers for the implementation of virtual care surveyed were:

•   Increase patient volumes and loyalty (29 percent)
•   Care coordination of high-risk patients (17 percent)
•   Reduce costs for access to medical specialists (17 percent)
•   Meaningful use and payer incentives for adoption (13 percent)
•   Patient requests/consumer demand (13 percent)

“The biggest drivers for adopting virtual care are increasing patient volumes, coordinating care and reducing costs for access to specialists,” Richard Bakalar, MD, managing director at KPMG and a member of the firm’s Global Healthcare Center of Excellence, tells Managed Healthcare Executive. “The biggest barriers to implementing telemedicine are tied to the number of technological priorities among providers [19%], organizational readiness [18%], and sustaining the business model [18%].”

Bakalar added that urgent care settings and rural communities have experienced the benefits of telemedicine. 

“Telehealth has gained a great deal of acceptance in urgent care, since it is efficient and the conditions are not terribly complex,” Bakalar says. “Also, it is helpful in settings where a doctor can offer a remote consult to guide clinicians about treatment plans, such as having a neurologist help emergency room doctors with a stroke patient or a geriatrician helping nursing home staff members determine whether a resident should get treatment in an emergency room.”