Telehealth is an opportunity, but it’s no longer about the gear

by Corey Scurlock, MD, MBA CEO & Founder Equum Medical

After a successful weekend at the American Telemedicine Association Annual Conference, I captured some thoughts of where we are in telehealth, and also my confidence that #telehealthishealth.

With healthcare cost inflation soaring, a growing workforce crisis and value-based payment about to reassert itself in the market, the healthcare tech boom hasn’t quite flatlined, but it needs a new business model. Innovation needs to fit into the budget, workflow and culture of a healthcare organization. It must solve a pressing need, be almost frictionless in implementation, light on IT resources and deliver a fast clinical and financial ROI.

The good news is that the workforce shortages, which span all types of staff, present an opportunity to solve one of the biggest challenges in the coming years. Telehealth can fill gaps in care and help prevent obstacles in patient flow from developing at key points in an inpatient journey. The focus needs to be on the care, not the technology, as the pandemic left everyone with devices.

I spent some years as the telehealth department leader of a multi-hospital healthcare system in suburban New York at a time when tele-ICU and remote patient monitoring were just hitting the market, so I was a good prospect for many patient monitoring and informatics companies. I was approached with products and services and plans for implementing them across my organization. Beyond the sticker shock, I noted that though I was the potential customer, it was on me to turn these products into "solutions"—meaning I was to find a problem for which the cool new technology was the perfect answer.

In many cases, I couldn’t see the immediate need, but I could anticipate the potential for these new solutions to cause disruption to our care workflows. Learning curves were often steep and time-consuming and involved technical steps everyone had to learn and relearn.

During this time, I began thinking of starting my own company. I quit my job and picked up telehealth shifts serving hospitals around the New York metro area at first and later farther from home. I observed which of the many of the solutions hospitals had found were actually improving care access, solving provider shortages and improving clinical outcomes.

I learned that any scalable and repeatable telehealth solution had to conform to the client’s needs, with variable elements of people, process and technology directed at clear challenges. More than one third of hospitals in the U.S. are nonurban community-level institutions, so if the marketed products fit more with urban integrated delivery networks, that could be an issue.

Equum Medical , the company I ultimately formed, leaves the technology to the client or assists them in choosing a system. We focus instead on hybrid care that spans the acute care continuum. It includes pod-style customer alignments, where locally based specialists licensed to provide medicine in the states they serve work seamlessly with bedside staff. Having implemented telehealth systems across the U.S., I know that not every hospital needs the same telehealth “system,” and many organizations today are at different stages of telehealth maturity, with as many as 30 different pieces of telehealth hardware and software spread across the enterprise. The need to prioritize and streamline these systems is paramount for many providers.

Here are some key steps for healthcare leaders looking to start, optimize or expand their telehealth programs:

• Start with an assessment of where you are today. As an organization that’s adopted telehealth through the pandemic, chances are you have technology with redundant capabilities. Is there one platform you can use to support the use cases you have identified?
• Leaders should measure the ongoing use and outcomes of the program against organizational key performance indicators, so buy-in supports further interest and investment for future telehealth expansion.
• Anticipate the disruption telehealth will create to clinical workflows. You are creating a new standard of care that’s a hybrid of in-person and virtual, so you need to set expectations.
• Add to your telehealth program only as the clinical and business use cases become clear.

Corey Scurlock is the CEO & Founder of Equum Medical, an acute care clinical services platform company