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  Today in health, it telehealth in depth by the numbers. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in health IT at Channel decades Keeping Health IT staff current. I. And engaged. I wanna thank our sponsor for today's series Healthcare. They reached out about this time last year and said, we love what you're doing and really appreciate your mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

The rest is history, as they say. If you also believe in our mission and want to support the show, please shoot me a note at partner at this week in health it.com. All right to today's story in this . Comes from telehealth and medicine today, it is actually a 20 page PDF with lots of really good information.

And what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna wet your appetite by going through the graphics in this, and hopefully, if you're interested, you'll hit my LinkedIn page or look at the show notes for this episode and it'll have a link to this document. There's just really a lot of good stuff in here. What they did is they took the claims data for last year.

And looked at telehealth visits. So if you're trying to build your case for Telehealth funding for the coming budget year, this is a good document to have if you are a policymaker. Also a great document to have just to understand where it's been and where it's going as a result of the pandemic. So lemme give you a couple of the graphics.

Visits in the month of April, which is pretty amazing. It actually represents 49% of all health claims. In the month of April. Were Telehealth claims, 12.7 million. Now it's dropped, as you would imagine, 10.7 the next month, 9.2, 8.7, 7.9, 7.6, but then it stabilized from there. So 7.6 million claims, about 20% of total claims being telehealth has been the norm.

A couple of the others in orders symptoms, ill-defined conditions, so those are people trying to figure out what they have. Circulatory system. Musculo skeletal and corrective, and it goes down from there. All right. The next graphic telehealth claims for services delivered in state versus out of state. So in-State claims represent a significant portion of the claims and out of state represent a very small portion of the claims.

That's probably the biggest takeaway from that graphic. Next graphic is how are you accessing telehealth in your practices? And this is broken down by urban, suburban and rural, and the number one way that they're accessing telehealth. Any guesses? . Zoom. Zoom is the number one way. Number two, audio only telephone.

That actually surprises me. I'm really surprised and excited about that. That's the first time a video modality, I think overtook audio only. So audio only telephone doxy me was third Doximity, video number four, telehealth vendor number five, FaceTime number six, EHR, module number seven, Microsoft teams.

Number eight, Skype. Number nine. Again, a lot of interesting information in this document, and I'm just going through the graphics. So the next graphic is provider's perception of quality of care, and they posed this question to them. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements?

Telehealth enables me to deliver quality of care for, and then they list some conditions. So Covid Ovid 19 related Care, 46% say more. Better quality of care for COVID. 19 related 6% say less acute care. 49% say better. 18% say less Chronic disease management. 83% say better. 5% less. Preventative care is 67% better, 8% less perioperative procedures, 28% better, 19% less ED follow up, 57% better, 7% less care coordination, 77% better, 3% less mental and behavioral health, 49% better, 4% less medication reconciliation, 72% better, 3% less.

Again, very informative. I if I were building my. Own telehealth practice within the health system. This is information I would want to have. What if any remote sensor technologies are helping you provide better care for your patients? Another interesting graphic, number one, the smartphone camera. That is actually not all that surprising to me.

40.4%. Smartphone camera number two, blood pressure cuffs. Number three, body weight. Scale number four. Pulse oximeter. Number five, smartphone, microphone. Makes sense. Six Thermometer, seven. Heart rate monitor continuous glucose monitors. Next activity monitors portable, EK, G in home, and then it goes on from there.

Okay. The next graphic, I think is something everybody needs to understand. Which of the following, if any, do you anticipate being barriers and challenges in your organization related to maintaining telehealth after COVID? 19. Okay. And they were allowed to choose all that? Apply. Number one, low or no reimbursement.

Number two, technology challenges. . For my patients. Number three, liability. Number four, integration with the EHR. Number five, integration of additional technologies and it goes on from there. Again, good chart to have. Next one equally is good. Which of the following, if any, do you perceive as barriers to your patients accessing telehealth?

Choose all that apply. Number one, lack of access to technology, lack of digital literacy in the patients, and number three, lack of patient access to broadband. Those are the top three, and that makes perfect sense to me. It goes on from there. Patient's preference for in-person visits, lack of patient access to data access.

Next, lack of patient awareness, understanding of telehealth offerings. Next, lack of health insurance, lack of access to community-based resources. And last but not least, all of the above. Alright. During the COVID-19 period, what would you have done if you did not have a telehealth option during this period?

All right, so what would you have done? Number one answer was delayed my care. Number two, gone to the provider's office. Number three, self-treated. Number four, gone to an urgent care clinic. Number five, reached out to a friend or other for advice, and number six, gone to the emergency room. All right, so those are the options.

Again, a lot of really great graphics in here. I'll let you go ahead and hit it. There are still several others to take a look at. What's the so what on this? Why does this matter? Why do I want this information as the CIO for a health system? The reason I want this information is because this is going to be the core of our work over the next couple of years, and it's going to be how do we integrate new kinds of care delivery models into our health system?

And telehealth happens to be one of those technologies that's gonna be used across a lot of different areas, but it's gonna be our growth strategy. It's gonna be our way of driving down our cost. It's gonna be our way of increasing access. It's gonna be our way of addressing health equities. Telehealth is going to be a major part of the conversation.

So when I see a study like this done by Harvard Medical School, MITRE Corporation, and, and Mayo Clinic and others, I, I get excited because they have already done the work of collecting this information. I can now use this information, break it down, and use it in my presentations. To help inform my health system of what the challenges are, what the potential is, what we saw during the pandemic, and this is the information I've been looking for quite some time.

If you listen during the Covid series that we did on this weekend, health it, I've said that we now have a treasure trove of information and we need to dive into that information and they have done that for us. So now we can start using this to build the narrative. Where do we invest? Where does it make the most sense?

Where will it drive out cost? Where will it only exacerbate the health equity problem? Where will it allow us to increase access? And what is the . Consumer's viewpoint on this as well. So we have a lot of claims data, a lot of information to work with, and this is extremely valuable in building out any strategy moving forward.

Alright, that's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture. We are everywhere. We wanna thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

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