A Blueprint for Generating Telehealth ROI
Five Important EleMents in the Continuum of Virtual Care
Just as cloud computing revolutionized the way we live and work, telehealth is revolutionizing healthcare, embracing a new model of patient consumerism and making healthcare more easily accessible, regardless of patient location. Healthcare organizations realize they need to catch up with modern consumer sentiment. Younger generations, born into a world in which mobile devices and the cloud are commonplace, already have an inherent comfort with virtual services. They expect to consume healthcare services using technology as they do with other services and applications.
Offering on demand virtual care-as-a-service (VCaaS), with an array of telehealth-delivered care, seems logical to younger consumers such as millennials and Gen Z. Other generations are also seeing the value of telehealth, as global events like COVID-19 have forced a shift in how people are receiving health care services and how they are experiencing a heightened need for safety and immediacy.
is telehealth the answer?
Telehealth responds to the need for organizations to look beyond traditional models of care and staffing and incorporate modern virtual-based services to improve both patient and business outcomes. It can help alleviate major barriers to quality care, including inadequate staffing, slower response times, and lack of available specialists.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) estimates a U.S. shortage of between 54,100 and 139,000 physicians, including shortfalls in both primary and specialty care, by 2033. In neurology, a 7% increase in the supply of neurologists is predicted from 2012 to 2025, whereas the demand will rise by 16%, according to a paper in the journal Neurology. Telehealth helps alleviates these staffing shortages, in providing 24x7 on-demand specialists – physician specialists that many organizations cannot afford to keep on staff full time.
Budget control is another key telehealth benefit. For example, round-the-clock neurologists can cost an estimated $1.2 million per annum. Contrast this with using a telephysician specialist on-demand service and the same patient coverage cost can be reduced 50%.
Providing virtual care also responds to the growing population that has shifted to home-based work, using the cloud or virtual private networks (VPNs) to be productive and safe. This patient demographic has become accustomed to virtual connectivity and is highly receptive to telehealth consults. They are less willing to bear the expense of travel for regular consults or monitoring when it is possible to connect to a telephysician in the comfort of their home. The remote model also encourages patients to manage their care better since cost and time barriers have been eliminated.
Telehealth is the answer to the triple dilemma facing health systems: staff and specialist shortages, budget constraints, and a greatly changed world in which remote work and life is now the standard.
Telehealth andROI: Five Essential Elements
Telehealth services will only expand if they are economically sustainable for an organization. If the initial investment is out of sync with available budget, if the critical services needed are not available, or the technology is overly difficult to deploy —consuming too much staff time at the front end — telehealth will be ROI negative on a balance sheet.
VeeOne Health’s reason for being is to eliminate these barriers by providing an intuitive platform that health systems can use to implement or expand virtual care. It supports a model that is financially viable, and which can be easily customized to the specific size of an organization, its patient load and the degree of need for virtual consults and specialty services.
Telehealth has already proven to be highly valuable in improving patient outcomes and in exhibiting better response times in critical care treatment like stroke response. More than 75% of clinicians responding to an AMA study indicated that telehealth enabled them to provide quality care in the areas of COVID19-related care, acute care, chronic disease management, hospital/ED follow-up, care coordination, preventative care, and mental/ behavioral health. It is a great example of how specialty services, for example, can provide both improved patient care – patient ROI – and conserve staffing budget through the use of specialists-on demand.
A study of a large healthcare system in Florida showed that after telehealth implementation, “ICU mortality also significantly reduced from 10.7% to 8.6%.”
This combination of financial and patient ROI benefits is why VeeOne Health’s technology and services are being deployed in major healthcare organizations like Banner Health and CommonSpirit, eaHHeas well as smaller hospitals facing severe physician shortages.
As you and your team further examine how telehealth can help your organization improve care, increase revenue, and generate higher ROI, take a look at these five key telehealth areas in the entire continuum of care.
- Inpatient, Acute Care, and Neurocare
- 24/7 Coverage: VeeOne Health’s Physician Services provides on-demand specialists, enabling organizations to serve ER and acute care patients who may otherwise not have access to timely, specialized care.
- Better patient outcomes: Patients may be able to receive better response time and avoid the stress of transfers, helping themselves and family members.
- ROI benefit: Hospitals can retain patients and not give up the revenue they would lose by patient transfer due to the lack of an available specialist. A telehealth-enabled emergency medical services program reduced ambulance transports by 56% and put paramedic units back into service 44 minutes faster.
One of the key areas in which VeeOne Health is assisting hospitals is stroke response. When it comes to neurology, strokes present the greatest challenge because they are time sensitive. The gold standard of care for ischemic strokes is to administer stPA within 3 to 4.5 hours.
Unfortunately, rapid response is not always possible. Emergency rooms, hospitals, and clinics do not always have neurologists on staff or immediately available. Smaller critical access hospitals, especially in rural areas, have been the hardest hit since specialists tend to be in short supply and unable to reach the patient location within the needed timeframe.
Teleneurology solves this dilemma for all hospitals by enabling physician consults within the timeframe needed to help deliver a positive patient outcome.