60% name telemedicine as a top priority

Sixty percent of providers surveyed named telemedicine as one of their highest priorities. Those are the findings of a survey conducted of 233 providers across the care continuum conducted by REACH Health, an enterprise telemedicine software solutions vendor.

REACH conducted the survey to get a good indication of where the market is by service line and care setting and projections for the future said, REACH President and CEO Steve McGraw in an interview with Clinical Innovation + Technology. “We wanted to be as comprehensive as possible.”

That led to some interesting findings, he noted. For example, “at the top of the list of ROI drivers is “improved reputation,” which is generally regarded as a soft driver for financial performance compared to hard drivers such as reimbursement.”

Obstacles to telemedicine include reimbursement which is “a patchwork quilt of rules that depend on the state and the care setting. But when you look at the regulatory changes and proposed legislation in the past few years, clearly telemedicine is on the right side of change.”

McGraw predicted that we will see parity between physical and virtual visits in the next couple of years.

But, he doesn’t think reimbursement is a huge factor in building or expanding a telemedicine program. “The first driver is patient care.”

The survey also indicated that having a dedicated program manager was really important. Seventy percent of survey respondents said telemedicine program managers need to spend at least half their time on the program. “One big drawback is finding the right person—someone with good project management skills, ideally a nurse who is multidisciplined. It’ hard to find someone with all those skills.”

The telemedicine market was born out of necessity, said McGraw—there was a time-sensitive illness or condition and a specialist was not available. “A lot of high acuity areas are being covered by telemedicine today.” In the future, there will be maturity in the high acuity space, he said, and we will seeing the lower acuity market begin to start to mature. “We will start seeing telemedicine used to bridge patient care from inpatient to outpatient and also for conditions that require expert consultation.”