While telehealth use has made tremendous gains since the emergence of COVID, the technology still sits largely on the sidelines. Telehealth visits are now widely available, but the providers offering these visits aren’t adding new capabilities or even integrating the technology into their overall workflow.
In theory, telehealth consults could be enriched with health data gathered from countless other sources and used to give providers a more nuanced picture of the patient’s status, but in my experience as a patient, this never happens.
As a patient, I’d definitely love to see telehealth visits incorporate information gathered from other digital sources – notably remote patient monitoring devices – but the platforms my providers use seem far too limited to support this.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted that telehealth is widely available in any form. As someone with multiple chronic illnesses, having remote access to my clinicians is a big deal in and of itself. Given that I see several specialists, I’m grateful that I don’t have to haul myself into their offices anytime I need something. I find it much easier to manage my health when I can be seen even if I don’t feel well enough to go out.
Still, I think it’s time to set higher standards for virtual visits. I believe that will never get full value out of telehealth consults until they transition from being a convenience to a turbo-charged tool that takes advantage of the rapidly expanding digital health capabilities we now have available.
For example, there are countless ways in which a provider could use both real-time and historic data on patients to conduct a more effective visit. If nothing else, they could get as good or better a snapshot of the patient’s status than they could if the patient was in the same room with them.
It would also be great if providers used specialty telehealth platforms to deliver unique service types during consults. For example, I’m sure the remote physical therapy visits I had during the peak of the pandemic would have been far more effective if the therapist and I worked within a shared tool rather than reading from paper copies outlining the exercises I was supposed to complete.
To be fair, making this kind of thing happen won’t be easy. I’m not aware of any telehealth platforms that offer off-the-shelf interactive care tools and patient data dashboards, and it’s easy to see why providers might not be ready to invest in building out such capabilities.
On the other hand, with the worst of the pandemic hopefully behind us, we could move in this direction quickly if we tried. With all we’ve learned about telehealth during the COVID era, we should capitalize on that knowledge before it grows stale. Maybe 2022 will be the year telehealth breaks out of its silo and begins to make a real impact on care.
