The future for Telehealth

After telehealth’s several false starts and occasional overhype, it took the COVID-19 pandemic to lay bare the benefits of telehealth. Looking beyond what is happening right now, the question is whether telehealth is entering a new era, or if it will fail in realizing its full potential.

The use of telehealth – which for me encompasses telemedicine, teleconsultation, telepathology, teleradiology, and e-prescription -- predates the COVID-19 crisis. What is different now is that we are witnessing a fast-tracking of telehealth solutions and, thanks to improved technology, higher bandwidth, and greater acceptance, the benefits are being realized on a grander scale. But caution is still required. Without smart planning, telehealth’s future success may be undermined.

As with many businesses, telehealth flourishes with higher volume. A flow of new patients—especially returning patients—is crucial. How many of us try a new online service as a novelty but never return? The challenge for telehealth is to embed itself as a go-to solution for accessing health services and for care coordination. The problem with many current solutions is that they serve an overly narrow market and often lack the bandwidth to expand.

COVID-19 has created a lightbulb moment in which telehealth is becoming more mainstream with greatly increased participation levels from the public, patients, and health professionals. Public and private health systems are finally embedding telehealth into everyday processes. The mission moving forward will be to seamlessly integrate it into the broader health care ecosystem.

I have talked a lot about telehealth’s expansion but maybe I need to step back for a moment and answer something more fundamental: what actually is telehealth? While there is no universally encoded definition and the term is often used (inappropriately, in my opinion) interchangeably with digital health, here is my personal perspective...

Telehealth is far more than a telephone or video call between a patient and doctor. To achieving broader buy-in and unlock its full potential and benefits, it is useful to elaborate a bit on its enormous capabilities to improve health care systems through, for example:

·        Enabling health service providers to better coordinate care. The telehealth doctor can be a central care coordination point with access to information from referred treatments.

·        Integrating and providing more seamless access to electronic health records (i.e. telehealth does not reside to one side).

·        Issuing e-prescriptions.

·        Providing feedback, insight, and information to patients and families through knowledge portals.

·        Collecting data to enable trend analysis while tapping the potential of Artificial Intelligence tools.

·        Informing and supporting health professionals (test results, second opinion support).

To implement telehealth correctly, thoughtful early planning is essential. It should be developed to meet the needs and expectations of the health professionals and patients and must also align with operational management and existing systems. It can be useful to study how electronic medical records and enterprise resource planning solutions were developed and apply lessons for these experiences. Avoid mistakes that lead to exorbitant costs and under-utilization due to poor planning, lack of stakeholder engagement (especially from health professionals), and non-alignment with existing processes.

In summary, when planning telehealth, understand what you need and what are your desired long-term outcomes. Think about how to scale up, as well as training, stakeholder engagement, network capability, regulatory alignment (for example, data protection), and systems integration.

The time is here for telehealth. Approached and implemented right, its benefits to health systems are considerable.