Telehealth in US has Long Way to Go

Philips finally released its long awaited study on the adoption of telehealth technologies among the nation’s some 976 home healthcare agencies. Initial results of his study were released last fall at the Connected for Health conference and I have been patiently waiting ever since to see the final report.

So to give you a preview here’s what you will find:

A long report, all 117 pages of it, with a lot of data that really seems nonsensical. Luckily, it is formated in such a way that one can readily skim through it and pull out tidbits of interest.

The tidbits I found particularly interesting were:

• Only 17% of home healthcare providers are using any type of telehealth monitoring. Big hurdles to adoption are the like the four horsemen of the apocalypse – quite obvious – Cost, Cultural, Workflow/Integration and Education.
• Single most important strategy to get clinical staff buy-in to adopt telehealth was to promote telehealth’s ability to improve quality of healthcare delivered.
• Reducing costs was not the primary objective for adopting telehealth. In fact, 48% reported that it did not reduce costs, versus 42% who did see some cost reductions.
• Over 70% of agencies using telehealth saw a marked increase in customer satisfaction levels. For those for-profit agencies, customer satisfaction was even higher at over 81%.

Some Final Comments:

Maybe agencies looking to adopt telehealth technologies as part of their service offerings need to rethink their strategy and not be so focused on the bottom-line of what telehealth can do for them, but what telehealth can do for their customers. Same can be said for the vendors of telehealth technologies.

There have been plenty of reports and proof points on the economic value of telehealth, for example its ability to reduce re-admittance rates. Yet, when vendors of telehealth look to sell their technology to the other 83% of agencies that still do not use telehealth in their practice, these vendors would be wise to consider this report’s findings and restructure their go to market strategy focusing on how their technology contributes to customer satisfaction, future referrals and top-line growth rather than the bottom-line savings message that is so prevalent today.