Changes in Managed Care: TeleHealth Tech and Medical Management
CareNational was founded with the goal of assisting Health Plans, Hospitals, and their ACO or HMO-type mixed entities. We do this by providing boutique Medical Management consulting and recruiting support to help our clients properly staff their teams with the best Case Managers, Utilization Review Nurses and Quality Management Specialists. Managed Care has always been an evolving industry, today more than ever! Since 2010, we’ve seen tremendous changes within healthcare and we wanted to further that with a discussion of current and future modifications to the industry. We started by asking: What changes in the Managed Care industry are you dealing with on a daily basis, and what do you see on the horizon?
For years, telephonic Case Management has been a key resource for Managed Care Organizations to communicate with their members in a timely and effective manner. But I wondered, what kind of technological changes are on the horizon that offer better patient management and lower healthcare costs? I have spoken with several experts specializing in the field of remote Care Management and they all agree that leveraging the power of the telephone to communicate with patients and members is really just the tip of the technological iceberg.
TeleHealth is the comprehensive approach to providing preventative care, observation (aka TeleMonitoring), and curative treatments (aka TeleMedicine) to patients who are not physically present. They all share the same root Greek prefix of Tele- meaning ‘far away’ or ‘at a distance’, and that idea is very much at the heart of TeleHealth (pun intended). As long as people have been communicating, they have been asking about each other’s health and offering suggested treatments. The technological explosion of the last 200 years has seen TeleHealth, in the form of physician consultations, transition from letters, to telegraphs, to telephones, to video conferencing, to the latest of smart-phone integrated devices on the market today. When you e-mail your doctor a picture of a rash on your arm, and he sends in an e-Rx to the pharmacy, you are actually participating in a fairly advanced form of TeleHealth.
Through the introduction of highly capable mobile devices and increased internet speeds, managed care organizations are moving towards some new technologies that could change the way we look at the Case Management and Disease Management process. Smart phones, tablet PCs, and laptops are all platforms of interest for Managed Care Organizations as a means to have more effective face-to-face interaction with members. Even newer technologies in fitness monitoring devices like FitBit, Jawbone, or Fuelband are a boon to TeleMonitoring activities. New mobile-integrated devices like smart watches and Google Glasses also have very interesting applications for managed care as they allow for real time remote monitoring as well as direct communication without the use of a handheld device.
In 2013 alone, some 350,000 patients utilized some form of TeleHealth technology but these numbers are expected to increase to over 7 million by 2018. Additionally, revenue generated from TeleHealth services is also expected to make a serious leap from $440 million in 2013 to $4.5 billion by 2018. The use of TeleHealth systems give Health Plans and other MCOs a significant advantage for early diagnosis, ongoing treatment, care coordination, and the prevention of health conditions that typically prompt a patient to visit a provider’s office. Ultimately it is about leveraging the latest technology to create value-based care.
Written by Josh Petre, Search Consultant. For more information on Managed Care trends or to discuss our current opportunities, reach out to one of CareNational’s best Medical Management Recruiters! Contact him at 1.800.974.4828 x118, or email him at [email protected]