The Future of Consumer Health: Changing the Landscape of Healthcare

 


PRESENTER
Peter Antall, M.D.
Chief Medical Officer
American Well





SESSION

Telehealth is a well-established technology used to provide on-demand healthcare directly to a patient, wherever the patient is currently located. While these vendor-driven use-cases offer patients convenience, access and decreased cost, they generally are unable to address the larger issues of population health and coordinated care. The emergence of direct to consumer telehealth has not gone unnoticed by providers and hospital systems, who are now embracing telehealth as part of an overall strategy to become more consumer centric, to participate in the direct to consumer market and to cost-effectively care for their patient populations.

Telehealth-enabled health systems offer the promise of high-quality, coordinated care that is convenient, consumer-centric and leverages the ability to bring to bear virtual care teams around patients and populations. Best practices have also emerged that combine the experience and quality systems that exist in hospital systems with the technology and consumer facing expertise that exists at the vendor level.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS: 

• Insight into why direct to consumer telehealth programs are growing and thriving
• Examples of hospitals and provider organizations are embracing telehealth and why it's good for patients
• Best practices and evidence-based guidelines for telehealth
• Challenges and barriers that still exist for providers

This session defined telehealth and explored the current state of telehealth.  Antall predicted that healthcare that is not already online will be very soon. He also stated that although we are in a new connected age, that is not necessarily true for healthcare as online healthcare is still often a “hassle” for consumers compared to the ease of many other online tasks and transactions.

TAKE-AWAY

• Telehealth will continue to make a difference
• The healthcare future holds self-scheduling provider options and the ability to access  
• practitioners in an uber-like manner
• Consumers are realizing that telehealth is available, helpful, and convenient
• Because of increased demand, vendors are now creating supply
• Large integrated systems are coming into the game since the bigger vendors want to
• keep their patients
• Telehealth saves time which could help doctors and patients alike
• 57% of health providers are providing or willing to provide telehealth
• Telehealth can broker meaningful connections between providers and patients
• Telehealth is still a challenge for everyone, largely due to the fact that it is relatively new
• Consumerism is about making things seamless and easy: press a button, connect, and have a meaningful health visit

BEST PRACTICES IN TELEHEALTH

Telehealth is about:

• Interacting with patients wherever they are and patients being able to reach their health providers wherever they may be
• Placing choice in the patient’s hands and offering a focus on convenience for both patients and providers
• Moving beyond acute care and behavioral health to follow-up visit simplicity during post-op checks, etc.
• Keeping all data available so there's no issue with taking medicines without doctors knowing
• Average wait time is 3 minutes (data from last 3 years) this is unprecedented, especially since it's already available in 48 states

THE FUTURE OF TELEHEALTH

• Rather than build a diffuse network, build a national medical group
• Build behavioral health and nutrition programs
• Operations and support: Running telehealth is different since there's a new learning curve
• The industry is working to develop dermatology, pediatrics, and hopefully post-op applications soon
• So many acute visits are usually reassurance only, so telehealth makes that easier
• Some worry that telehealth will take away patients, but that's not the case according to data
• Healthcare has to change and has to be able to facilitate the types of visits you would normally do
• Due to unused capacity of physicians, uber-like technology makes it easier to connect patients with available doctors
• There's a wealth of consumer biometrics in the cloud
• Collaborative care with full patient data for all health care providers who are working with the patient is the way to go, there needs to be a focus on centralized data
• The industry is slowly moving from consumer space to hospital setting
• 3 way video for multi-way conversation with patients (either another physician, caregiver, translator, etc.) will make things easier
• It's not just about the technology, that's just where you start.
• Need to think about workflow, staffing model, etc.
• Think about knowledge transfer, living documents, etc.
• Future is about reinventing how healthcare is delivered
• All consumers are patients and all patients are consumers
• The industry is starting work in the Medicaid space, we need a tool to democratize health care

FINAL THOUGHT

Clearly telehealth will be a game for the medical industry. Due to its increasing availability, ease of use, and convenience for both patient and practitioner, not only will it save everyone who uses it money, but time as well. Additionally, telehealth has the potential to make things much easier for family members to help and reassure patients by being there without actually physically being there. That is revolutionary.