This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

 Today in Health it, this story is a large study on the use of telehealth and what do we learn that we don't already know about the use of telehealth. 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 dedicated to keeping health IT staff current.

And engaged. We don't have a show sponsor for today. So if you're listening to this, you know, the power of podcasting, this show has grown really rapidly, uh, over the last three months that we've been doing the show. And we have seen well over 5,000 downloads in the last couple of months. I. And it just continues to grow.

If you wanna get your message out in front of a targeted healthcare audience, send an email to partner at this week in health it.com and we will start to highlight your offering, your organization on this show. Alright to today's story. Today's story comes from healthcare IT news. It's a good short, sweet story.

It covers a study of 36.5 million people and it reveals a huge jump in pandemic Telehealth use Tell us something we don't already know. Well. The reality is it does put some numbers behind what we know, which is really helpful. During the first four months of C Ovid 19 telehealth visits accounted for 23.6% of all interactions compared with the.

Million people in the United States found a dramatic increase in telehealth use during the first four months of the Covid to 19 pandemic. Using data from Blue Health Intelligence data repository and independent data and analytics company that is a EE of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.

Telehealth rates amid the pandemic researchers limited the study population to individuals covered through employer-based Affordable Care Act and other private health insurance plans, but not Medicare and Medicaid. An important limitation given emerging evidence about virtual care's role in exacerbating the digital divide.

We'll talk about that in a minute. Still, researchers found that virtual care use rates were higher in the most socially disadvantaged neighborhoods. Versus the least socially disadvantaged neighborhoods. Rates were also higher in states with high rates of Covid 19 during this study and urban locations, which is as you would expect, age and disease burden appears to be associated with telehealth uptake and with those age 18 to 49 years.

And with two or more chronic conditions using more telehealth, noted the study. Again, that would make sense. Behavioral health encounters were far more likely than medical contacts to take place virtually. We have had that conversation many times. Behavioral health is the big winner in the telehealth surge.

We've seen just a, a lot of offerings and a lot of uptake in those offerings. This is a. Extremely good thing for our society. In addition, people receiving C Ovid 19 care had substantially increased medical costs, as well as visit rates and telehealth use rates. The researchers noted that relying on claims-based data can have limitations.

Any claims-based research is sensitive to missing or inaccurate coding. That corresponds to variations in policies or benefit structures across health plans. They wrote, they go on, they talk about the larger trend, and we're almost through the article here. So telehealth is here to stay, has become a frequently cited mantra among a wide range of stakeholders.

But the question still remains. How, although members of Congress have frequently introduced legislation to safeguard virtual care access in some capacity, none of the bills have made it into law. Meanwhile, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission told policymakers earlier this month that they should temporarily continue some of the telehealth flexibilities allowed during the public health emergency to gather more evidence about the impact of telehealth on care access quality.

And program spending. Alright. That's pretty much the, the, the gist of the article. There's an awful lot in there to discuss. So telehealth is here to stay. We, we know that it is a mantra we hear over and over again, and we should probably stop saying it. It's like saying grocery stores are here to stay. Of course they are.

There is a, an uptake of use. There's habits that have been formed. There is technologies that have been rolled out. It is being adopted and it's being used. Alright, so now it becomes how is it going to be used and how's it gonna be funded? I, I believe it will be funded, but one of the things that's gonna happen before it gets funded is there's gonna be an exhaustive amount of research on what was effective and what doesn't.

When you think about it, CMS has done a massive pilot. They've collected a ton of data, and now they need to sift through that data and say, okay, what was effective with telehealth and what wasn't with regard to the care of the population that they are stewarding. Right, and that's generally the Medicare population and in the State's case, the Medicaid population.

And we should be able to look at that and say, you know what? These kinds of telehealth practices were very effective during Covid, therefore they should continue and we should find a way to fund them. And that's no small deal. But that is the process that really should go down. I'm not really surprised or concerned that there's nothing that's been turned into law.

It would be premature to turn anything into law at this point. It's a matter of finding the funding for the things that are working. I. To deliver better care within our communities. Let's, let's go on, it talks about, it exacerbates the digital divide. It actually does not exacerbate the digital divide.

That's the wrong use of words. In that case, it does reveal a digital divide. Absolutely. When you put a tool like this out there, you start to see where it gets used and where it doesn't get used, and who can use it and who can't use it. So it reveals a digital divide that needs to be addressed, but it doesn't exacerbate.

Problem definition matters, and we define telehealth as three distinct things, visits, consults, and remote patient monitoring essentially is the definition we've put to it at today in health it, and this week in health it. And the reason we did that is 'cause telehealth is such a broad category. And we have to have some definition so that we can determine what success looks like, what the use cases look like in a first time visit, a consult or remote patient monitoring visits get the most press.

It is the biggest splashes in the VC community in the IPO market in the acquisition space. And so it gets a lot of press. Consults will be equally as impactful as we spread the expertise of a few physicians more efficiently across a large population. And remote patient monitoring is really the future which is emerging as we speak.

I wouldn't get fixated on telehealth as a strategy, but rather care delivery as a strategy and patient acquisition as a strategy, and then place the appropriate telehealth medium into the workflow. For our part as health it, it should be easy to use, extensible, and integrated into the clinician and patient experience.

Telehealth is here to stay. It is a powerful tool for delivering care and how it is done will differentiate the winners and losers in healthcare. 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 to our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to Podcast Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher.

You get the picture, we are everywhere or we are trying to be. We wanna thank our channel sponsors for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders, VMware Hillrom, Starbridge Advisors, McAfee and Aruba Networks. Thanks for listening. That's all for down.