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Telehealth a key component in healthcare transformation

As healthcare continues its transformation in today’s digital world, telehealth plays a crucial role. Telemedicine leaders share their insights.

Dr. Andrew Watson

Dr. Andrew Watson

While some view telehealth as a radical shift from the current model of healthcare, to Dr. Andrew Watson it represents a natural evolution in a digital world. Just as we’ve largely eschewed paper checks in favor of debit cards to pay bills, swapping a trip to the doctor’s office for a virtual visit from a patient’s home or workplace is another way technology has made life easier.

“It’s returning healthcare to its roots where it’s always belonged,” says Watson, a colorectal surgeon and telemedicine director at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), as well as a member of the American Telemedicine Association Board of Directors. “Telemedicine is natural. If you watch people walk along the street on their phones… It’s just the natural way we live and breathe these days.”

Alexis Gilroy

Alexis Gilroy

As healthcare continues its transformation, telehealth plays a key role in the equation. It changes what’s possible in delivering healthcare services by enabling access, forging collaborations, harnessing digital information, and expanding value and commercialization, says Alexis Slagle Gilroy, a partner at the law firm Jones Day and an American Telemedicine Association board member. “We are not changing the clinical service,” she says, “but rather the how, when and where such service is conveyed.”

Over the last few years, telehealth has increasingly supported industry-wide efforts toward healthcare quality and value-based payments, Gilroy says. One example, she says, is “provider-to-provider” telehealth specialist programs, such as telestroke and telepsychiatry, that support quality requirements in community hospitals.

At UPMC, virtual patient portals replace some in-person primary care visits, letting patients get a sore throat checked from home using a mobile device, Watson says. The provider then develops a treatment algorithm, which sometimes includes medication.

Gilroy says incorporating telehealth before and after surgical procedures can improve patient participation and reduce costs—a key concept in bundled payment and “value-oriented” arrangements. With remote patient monitoring, Watson says, a surgeon can send a patient home with tools such as a blood pressure monitor to keep tabs on recovery at home.

Even if the Affordable Care Act is eventually repealed or replaced, Watson says, telehealth will remain equally important under any new system. “Telehealth is applicable, regardless of who’s president,” he says. Telehealth gives patients more options as they make decisions about their care based on rising insurance costs and high-deductible or alternative insurance arrangements that require more out-of-pocket costs, Gilroy says.

Telehealth has opportunities to continue its growth throughout healthcare as almost every aspect of healthcare has a digital component. The consumer electronics market—namely Google, Apple and Verizon—are enabling this growth with each new technology providing new applications for telehealth, Watson says.

Gilroy also expects telehealth to improve and expand healthcare delivery. If data from these digital encounters are studied and used appropriately, she says, providers will learn new ways to efficiently provide healthcare services and meet the needs of populations of patients.

“It is my personal significant hope that telehealth will enable health providers to leap across great distances to advance training and support of healthcare providers in locations around the globe with significant needs for specialists and advanced medical training,” Gilroy says.

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