Contributed Commentary by Joel E. Barthelemy

December 12, 2019 | Telemedicine today is much more than a physician mounting a web camera to their laptop and offering video visits to patients. The industry has grown and continues to grow at a rapid pace across the world — in homes and schools to natural disasters and oil rigs in the middle of the ocean. Telemedicine has transcended to true “virtual care” and is an industry expected to grow to more than $66 billion globally by 2021, according to Mordor Intelligence.

Healthcare providers are likewise evolving from offering only convenience consults to adopting more evidence-based virtual care delivery solutions. These innovations can enable large, multidisciplinary, multi-location care teams to remotely access patients’ medical records and collaborate in virtual face-to-face consultations in real-time for more accurate diagnoses, informed care plans and a shorter time to treatment.

Thanks to this growth, major corporations have joined the market. Hospitals and practices are harnessing new technologies to make dramatic leaps in clinical outcomes. This, in turn, has fueled more sophisticated technology and smarter practices as healthcare leaders learn how to fully maximize virtual health’s potential.

Not Your Dad’s Telemedicine Anymore

Having been in the telemedicine space for nearly two decades, I predict most virtual health growth will be vertical rather than horizontal. As hospitals grow to depend on telemedicine for delivering advanced care, they are requesting new features and capabilities from their telemedicine solution partners to address even more sophisticated provider needs. That includes connective tools for advanced treatment in a number of specialties—cardiology, dermatology, endocrinology, infectious disease, neurosurgery, obstetrics, and rheumatology, just to name a few —to deliver integrated care as an organization.

Hospitals are also using telemedicine to connect paramedics and other first responders to intensivists, neurologists, or cardiologists for fast expert care. With medical events such as a stroke or heart attack, immediate intervention can mean the difference between life or death or a partial or full recovery. Teleparamedicine, as it is called, helps connect patients and paramedics to top specialists before the patients are even loaded into an ambulance. Paramedics can also tell if a lower-acuity destination may more appropriately meet an individual’s needs—lowering costs and reducing avoidable transports.

Next year and in the coming years, I expect we’ll see an increase of physicians using virtual care delivery to collaborate with home health nurses, checking medication adherence and conducting timely follow-up appointments to ensure patients get the support and resources they need. Involving caregivers in virtual visits can also help providers better understand their patients’ recovery and know when a medication change or other intervention can get a patient back on track.

Big Corporations Joining the Market

Retail clinics at Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens are already offering telemedicine services to satisfy patient demand while digital assistants like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa are being utilized for chronic disease management and care coordination. We’ll continue to see major corporations launch such virtual health ventures—and why wouldn’t they? They see a huge business opportunity. Not only is there significant patient demand, but the biggest healthcare payer in the country, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has loosened their reimbursement requirements for virtual visits while also incentivizing more physicians to consistently monitor their patients who have heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder or other chronic conditions. That monitoring, CMS has obliged, can include encounters and data sharing through virtual health technology.

Spurred by payment model changes, the major tech companies and other technology leaders in the field are developing new artificial intelligence technology to support these virtual health ventures. Most importantly, telemedicine leaders are creating tools that translate data into meaningful medical insights. Providers will be better able to predict future outcomes, such as the likelihood of having cancer, a stroke, a mobility disorder, or a cardiac event. In turn, clinicians will be able to craft early and accurate treatment plans when they can do the most good.

At the same time, however, as virtual care delivery participation grows, so does the opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit weaknesses in software and security protocols for financial gain. Hospitals and healthcare networks are the top victims of online criminals. To avoid failed compliance fines, stolen, data and brand embarrassment, they need telehealth platforms that have been already architected with security in mind, instead of presenting an insecure solution for the hospital IT team to worry about. In 2020, I believe most successful telemedicine solutions will be those that encrypt confidential data, meet state, federal and international compliance standards and privacy regulations, and include capabilities for retaining data after an attack or loss of power.

Just Scratching the Surface

Healthcare will always have challenges to solve. Given the thirst for new solutions and technologies, I believe telemedicine will rise to play a larger role in driving evidence-based decision making, treating chronic care conditions, lowering the cost of care for high-risk patients, and moving the needle for value-based care and stronger patient outcomes.

Joel E. Barthelemy is founder and CEO of GlobalMed, a virtual health company that is honored to be the telehealth provider to the White House, Dept. of Veterans Affairs and Defense Health Agency and many commercial healthcare systems in the U.S. and around the world. Joel can be reached at jbmkt@globalmed.com.