The following is a guest article by Sid Viswanathan, President and CEO, Truepill.
It’s an understatement to say that healthcare has undergone a rapid transformation in the wake of COVID-19. As patients avoid in-person obligations like doctors’ offices and pharmacies, they’ve turned to services like prescription delivery, telemedicine and at-home diagnostics at a rapid rate — completely upending the status quo.
While this shift to digital healthcare felt sudden, it was actually both long overdue and well underway. Over the last decade, the success of disruptive companies like GoodRx, Hims, Oscar, and One Medical proved that a new approach to health resonated with consumers. However, the healthcare industry as a whole still lagged behind — leaving a majority of Americans (68% report having private health insurance) to navigate disparate and inefficient systems on their own.
The pandemic brought that shift full circle…and fast. One year later and it’s almost unfathomable to think about going in-person for every minor ailment or prescription refill. Patients instead are seeking out opportunities to take control of their health through convenient, digital channels on their own terms. In turn, healthcare companies of all walks of life — from the DTC brands that kicked off the shift to institutions like health plans and pharmaceutical manufacturers — are confronting this new reality and adopting more effective systems that prioritize the patient experience above all else.
As healthcare faces a wave of consumerization, we see a future where 80% of care will be delivered digitally, and there are three essential pillars needed to power that future.
1. Pharmacy Fulfillment and Delivery
Prescription delivery is the first and most accessible way to modernize the patient experience. After all, nobody likes making an extra trip to the pharmacy just to waste an average of 45 minutes waiting for your prescription. DTC brands like Hims and Nurx proved that getting a prescription could be an effortless and modern experience similar to how consumers get everything else they need: online, on-demand and delivered to their doorsteps.
The arrival of these brands was radical, but only because it simplified a world that was so entrenched in the past. For decades, manual processes and archaic technologies were a detriment to both the pharmacist and patient — they created a high-stress work environment for pharmacists, and long lines and fulfillment delays for patients. Even in the 21st century when many consumers don’t even have a landline, pharmacists were reliant upon fax machines to service their customers.
While mainstream appetite for prescription delivery was already growing, demand surged in the wake of COVID-19. Mail-order prescriptions grew by 21% during the last week in March, and CVS reported a tenfold increase in home prescription deliveries during the first three months of 2020. Since then, a whole roster of big-name brands have entered the market, including Amazon, Uber Eats, as well as DoorDash and Sam’s Club.
It is simply no longer a viable, scalable solution to send patients to a retail pharmacy when they can have almost anything delivered to their doorstep, often in the same day.
2. Telehealth
The utility of telehealth has been clear for quite some time, but adoption was slow. Patients and doctors had a hard time letting go of the old-school experience, and often insurance providers didn’t cover telehealth as they did traditional in-office visits.
However, just like prescription delivery, the pandemic pushed patients (and their insurance providers) to skip the in-person appointments in favor of something new: virtual visits. Since then, the adoption of telehealth has skyrocketed. According to recent research by McKinsey, 11 percent of US consumers used telehealth in 2019, and that number grew to 46 percent in 2020.
Better yet, patients actually report enjoying these services. In a recent survey, 94% of consumers who sampled telehealth for the first time during the pandemic reported satisfaction with the ease and convenience, and “expressed interest in other modes of virtual care, such as digital monitoring and at-home lab testing.”
If the industry continues to embrace telehealth (backed by plenty of proposed bipartisan bills to ensure access), it has the potential to reimagine primary, preventative and emergency care, empowering patients to better manage their appointments and maintain their health in the long term. And by reducing foot traffic in-person, office visits can be more readily accessible for the patients who really need it.
3. At-Home Diagnostics
The final pillar to creating an end-to-end digital healthcare experience is at-home diagnostics. When combined with telehealth visits and prescription delivery, at-home testing can enable the remote diagnosis and management of the most pressing acute conditions like the flu and COVID-19, and the largest chronic disease states, including diabetes, heart disease and chronic kidney disease.
Like prescription delivery and telehealth, at-home test adoption has grown exponentially throughout the pandemic, with test providers like Everlywell estimating $100M in sales last year. However, at-home tests have not been without their fair share of criticism and questions over safety and accuracy.
That said, tests have come a long way and there are a few best practices to follow. For one, it’s critical that the test quality is high: the science is very strong, and the test has a high likelihood of generating correct positive and correct negative results (as opposed to false positives and negatives). It is also imperative that the labs processing the tests are CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited, as well as perform frequent internal quality checks to validate the test’s accuracy.
With these measures in place, at-home testing can truly change the game for consumerized healthcare — turning time-consuming and stressful lab work into a 5-minute errand.
Combining the Pillars and Looking Ahead to Connected Devices
By simultaneously and seamlessly executing the core elements of digital healthcare — prescription fulfillment and delivery, telehealth and at-home diagnostics — the industry can provide the care patients demand. The possibilities are truly endless — from convenient routine general wellness exams and chronic care to more accessible entry points for behavioral health treatment, hormone therapy, sexual wellness and more.
Additionally, rapid advancements in connected devices, like smart scales and blood pressure cuffs, will soon equip patients to digitally monitor and track and share their vitals from anywhere via cellular networks— unlocking even more opportunities to advance virtual, at-home healthcare.
There’s simply no going back to the old way of doing things. The future is consumerized, digital care and it’s here to stay.
