4 January 2022
Telehealth was one of the great beneficiaries of the COVID-19 pandemic. With patients unable to visit their doctors in person, telehealth provided a lifeline.
It was an exciting business to be in with massive expansion over a very short period – some estimated 10 years worth of growth in a single year. Telehealth was seen as a way of increasing efficiency for doctors and providing readier access for patients. The future of healthcare seemed to be digital and company valuations seemed to reflect that sentiment, with companies like Teladoc, Amwell and of course Zoom – widely used as a deliverer of telehealth, seeing their stock soar.
A year on and it’s a different story. As the pandemic has entered its later stages, people are heading back to their GPs and family physicians. It’s a trend we have seen already in the USA and it’s happening here in the UK too. Stocks for big telehealth companies are down too.
Our business, focused as it is on secondary care, has always leaned towards in-person consultations. It’s what our patients want, indeed, what they expect as part of the service. Does this mean that telehealth is a fallback position, used just for emergencies or are we thinking too narrowly?
“Telehealth has been in the crosshairs,” said Adam Gale, CEO and cofounder of Klas, an organization that rates Health IT companies, on the podcast Healthcare Is Hard, hosted by venture firm LRVHealth. “Everyone had one or two solutions they went into COVID with and came out with five or six or seven.”
Now, he says, companies are trying to reconfigure their telehealth strategies for the long term. That may mean dropping all the products these companies bought during the pandemic, because they no longer fit. Where in April 2020, health care was largely happening online, now roughly 13%-17% of care happens online, according to McKinsey, with psychiatry comprising the majority.
At home testing in conjunction with telehealth is certainly one way forward with wearables and in-home monitoring technology becoming readily available for patients but the really interesting move that is on the increase is the way that digital health companies are moving into physical locations.
It’s the USA where we see the first steps in this interesting hybrid of physical and digital, particularly in primary care. Carbon Health, an early virtual care provider, now has physical locations in 17 regions. Amazon Care, yes that Amazon , has also opened 17 clinics for its employees in conjunction with Crossover Health.
As secondary care providers through our clinics and Get Well Soon platform, we are very conscious of patient’s needs. In some cases telehealth will be the solution to initial or followup consultations but it does seem that patients, in the main, want to be able to see their clinicians in person, which is something we have always acknowledged.
Telehealth has come a long way in a short time but its present state should be seen as like the early days of ecommerce. It will be up to healthcare companies to figure out how to use the tools they have to create the ultimate patient experience, much like Amazon did in ecommerce.
Telehealth is not down and out, it’s just in its infancy.
