Telehealth & telehealth related services have been on an upswing since the wake of COVID-19. In fact it is not a stretch to say that telemedicine is one of the few silver linings we got from the pandemic. Telemedicine has proven itself to be the most reliable and the most efficient tool via which patients can access healthcare anytime they want, the instant they want and from the safety and comforts of their place of residence.
Quality healthcare is a metric that is always used to gauge the state of the country and telehealth has ensured that healthcare is always accessible and is made available to all despite the stresses of the pandemic. In fact the pandemic was one of the driving forces that made the populus embrace telehealth more readily. While telehealth was discovered long before, it has been widely accepted today.
In order to understand how telehealth has aided the pandemic or how wide spread telehealth is, we need answers to some questions like, why the sudden implementation? What is the future of telehealth? In what ways telehealth is being used across specialities etc?
All of these questions and so much more recently surveyed by the American College of Physicians (ACP). This survey was attended by over 159,000 of its members, covering a broad spectrum of physicians by size of practice, rural vs. non-rural locations and specialties. This survey proved to be the best testing ground for determining the extent and the methods in which telemedicine is being implemented.
The methodology used for the survey is very comprehensive, between the months of December 2019 and January 2020, ACP surveyed a random sample of 1,972 members in the US aged 65 and younger. Completed responses were received from 231 members (11.7% response rate) providing patient care (by specialty: 49% general internal medicine, 24% hospital medicine and 26% subspecialists).
Conclusion
The three major methods in which telehealth is being implemented is via video visits, e-consults and asynchronous evaluations. Telemedicine applications that cater to these three types have a bright future even post pandemic. Through another deeper analysis of this survey, we find that there are two major barriers to adoption of telehealth
- While physicians are extremely interested to adopt and implement telehealth, they have financial & structural concerns
- Only 6% have truly shown no interest in telehealth services and only 7% feel that there is no need for it now.
However, despite these hindrances, 22% of physicians are eager to use this technology in the future, which is a huge jump from last year’s 18%. Most importantly, 58% of ACP members wish to learn more about telehealth solutions.
The RCM and billing experts at BillingParadise, have correctly understood the importance of Telehealth and have actively been endorsing it since before the pandemic and in order to make it easier for physicians (regardless of their practice size) to implement telemedicine services, BillingParadise has decided to provide end-to-end support of telemedicine, including telemedicine training and continuous patient engagement services, all in very affordable rates.
