Virtual healthcare visits have increased during the coronavirus pandemic, kicking off a trend that will extend past the crisis.
The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the growth of telemedicine at an unexpected rate. With shelter-in-place orders and social distancing efforts, many individuals have opted–and been forced–to visit physicians via video conference.
Virtual care visits are projected to exceed 1 billion in the US in 2020, with 900 million visits related to COVID-19, 200 million visits related to general care, and 80 million visits related to mental health, a Forrester report found.
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“CVS Health reported in their earnings call that they had seen a 600% increase in virtual care visits over the course of Q1, compared to what they had seen last year,” said Arielle Trzcinski, senior analyst serving application development and delivery professionals at Forrester.
“Furthermore, folks like NYU Langone, for example, that have fairly robust programs, have reported a 4,000% increase in non-urgent care visits that were delivered over telehealth,” Trzcinski said.
The demand in telemedicine during the pandemic has increased so dramatically that the Federal Communications Commission announced a COVID-19 Telehealth Program, in which it dedicated $200 million to build telehealth services for hospitals and healthcare organizations.
“Robust telemedicine options have been around since at least the late 1990s and early 2000s as consumer adoption of the internet expanded. However, adoption rates were low,” said Alex Edsel, professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.
“CMS (Medicare) is a major driver of adoption. Until this year, CMS did not allow telemedicine visits to be billed at the same rate as in-person visits,” Edsel said. “This past March, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, CMS on a temporary emergency basis allowed 85 services to be billed at the same rate as in-person visits.”
Prior to the coronavirus virus, telemedicine was already gaining ground, particularly in mental health. Many rural Americans have benefited from online mental health services for the past few years.
The coronavirus forced doctors across disciplines to assimilate to online practices. With how successful the transition has been, telehealth services are on track to become the new normal sooner than expected.
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Benefits of telehealth
Doctors jumped on board quickly with telemedicine, mainly because the technology saved many physicians’ practices, said Clinton Phillips, CEO and founder of Medici, a HIPAA-compliant telehealth app.
“Doctors went from saying, ‘I’m thinking about doing telemedicine over the next few years,’ to all of a sudden going, ‘I have to do telemedicine, and I need to do it today,”http://www.techrepublic.com/” Phillips said.
“We’ve been telling doctors for years that by 2024, there will be more virtual visits per day than in-person visits. COVID has brought that date two years, maybe three years forward,” Phillips noted. “Before, doctors were saying, ‘Oh, 1% of visits are virtual. This will take forever.’ Now they’re going, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really happening.”http://www.techrepublic.com/”
Major benefits include efficiency, cost savings, and doctors’ overall quality of life.
- Efficiency
“[Telehealth] allows a person to not have to drive, park a car, pay for parking, and sit in a waiting room,” Phillips said.
“Not only are providers able to see more patients virtually than in-person,