Part 1 of a 2-part blog series
On September 15th, The Nashville Entrepreneur Center hosted the first round of two virtual sessions for the 2022 Telehealth Academy. I had the honor of kicking off the event, during which I pointed out four distinct trends in the industry. Here’s a summary of some of thoughts I shared.
These past few years have seen a flurry of activity around virtual care and I’m excited to see how it’s changed the broader healthcare industry. As you may know, eVisit had already been in business for about six years before the pandemic struck, so let me start by talking a bit about our origins.
Prior to founding eVisit, I had spent some time at some large, highly competitive telemedicine companies. That’s where I recognized the need for a virtual care platform built for—not compete against—large enterprise health systems that were trying to drive their own virtual care strategy using their own physicians.
Fast forward to the pandemic.
During this difficult time, we all saw a massive adoption of tech-enabled health care—things that were probably on everyone’s five-year roadmap before the pandemic, but which quickly became a priority in March 2020. Some organizations were further along in their adoption of telehealth, but I think as things started to play out, the industry became fond of saying things like, “This has changed healthcare forever.”
That’s a bold claim, but for me the most notable development was actually the acceleration of the consumerization of care. It just so happened that many elements of this consumerization—convenience, cost, safety, patient experience, and more—happened to be associated with telemedicine.
And that’s why I’m so excited that eVisit is sponsoring this year’s Telehealth Academy. Here we have an opportunity to bring together some of the greatest thought leaders in the country on this topic to work through the challenges that we've seen occurring with so many healthcare organizations.
It was incredibly inspiring to see the way that our health care ecosystem responded to the pandemic. And I’m very honored that eVisit has been able to help some of the largest health systems in the country work through their telehealth strategy—organizations like Banner Health, Texas Health Resources, and Concentra to name a few.
So, as enterprise-level healthcare organizations have continued to adapt to a rapidly changing market, what trends are we seeing? Let me address a couple of them in this blog.
Trend #1: Partnerships matter
In speaking with CIOs and other executives, a key learning is that in the rush to meet patient needs, many of them implemented whatever solution they had available at the time—solutions like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and even FaceTime. But now those same executives are beginning to understand that it’s not just about having the technology in place, it’s about having the right partner.
More and more, we’re hearing from executive leaders in healthcare who are starting to identify the need for a partner in the journey of evolving their virtual care strategies. And most importantly, they’re looking for a partner that offers a solution that doesn’t compete with them. That is, they want a platform partner that will work with them to incorporate their unique workflows and organizational needs into their virtual care delivery model but who isn’t competing with them for patient visits on the back end.
Trend #2: Two-way video is not virtual care
The second trend is that health systems are increasingly looking for solutions that can meet more than their need for a video call. As I alluded to before, it’s not just about having some sort of two-way video technology in place.
Rather, today’s healthcare executives are looking for solutions that integrate with their existing ecosystem such as their EHR and scheduling software. And they need highly configurable solutions that can run the gamut across their enterprise managing multiple specialties, creating consistency for the providers, delivering great patient experiences, and providing more insight for the executives leading and supporting these efforts.
Simply put, two-way video is not virtual care. And that’s what we’re hearing from today’s healthcare leaders.
Learn more
Subscribe to the Virtual Care Blog for part 2 of this series, where I’ll be sharing insights on two more trends we’re seeing in the industry. In the meantime, register for the remaining two days of the Telehealth Academy, virtually on Sept. 22 and in-person on Sept. 29.
