Julian Flannery is the Founder and CEO of Summus Global, the leading virtual specialist platform.
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The pandemic has been a watershed for virtual care. After years of skepticism, health-care consumers and physicians are eager to add medical consultations to the growing list of things they handle online and adding telehealth solutions to benefit packages has become HR professionals’ top priority. The question now is whether Covid-era behavior changes will stick or if patients’ and physicians’ newfound affinity for virtual care will fade when a semblance of normalcy has returned.
To understand where virtual care is today, it’s important to know its history. Early players such as Amwell and Teladoc began to emerge in the early 2000s, offering video solutions to connect patients with primary care doctors. Their goal was to increase efficiency and help people get faster appointments for routine issues. At around the same time, new “remote second opinion” providers started enabling delivery of written second opinions from specialists across state borders, which let patients access high-quality opinions from top hospitals anywhere in the U.S.
Over time, an increasing number of employers and carriers embraced the idea of virtual care benefits, but utilization still lagged, forcing key players to go in one of two different directions. Some broadened their offerings to position themselves as one-stop-shops for virtual care to drive higher utilization, while others focused on specialty care verticals, such as cancer, diabetes or musculoskeletal conditions. Consumer and physician adoption steadily increased, but virtual care still only accounted for a small fraction of medical consultations overall.
Then Covid-19 hit. The pandemic has driven health-care consumers and physicians online in unprecedented numbers. For example, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) saw a 3,700% increase in telemedicine visits from March to the end of April. Overall, the majority of patients who experienced virtual care during the pandemic have had positive experiences. In fact, 33% of millennials and 41% of Gen Z said they actually preferred virtual experiences to in-person doctor visits, according to recent Accenture research.
Now that consumers and physicians know it’s possible to receive and provide excellent care in this new paradigm, the trend is unlikely to reverse itself. Increased demand from employees will turn HR professionals into more discriminating buyers of virtual-care solutions; as a result, quality will be their top consideration. Instead of treating virtual care as a novelty and adding it to benefit portfolios as a box-checking exercise, HR teams will feel an onus to carefully vet solutions and ensure that the chosen offering is aligned with company priorities.
As a result of this increased scrutiny on virtual-care providers, the field of competing solutions will likely narrow. It’s a bit like e-commerce in the ‘90s and early 2000s when a large field of players gradually gave way to Amazon because of the high-quality experience it delivered — both in terms of usability and the abundance of available products. To be clear, in the case of virtual care, I'm not suggesting that one monolith will or should be left standing after vanquishing all competitors.
In order to capture significant market share in the employer market, virtual care providers, and particularly those focused on specialty care, will need to have a well-curated network of physicians that can be accessed from anywhere, as well as a high-quality user experience, including short wait times to access specialists. A recent survey by Mercer of over 16,000 workers across four continents showed that the top two most important factors for consumers when determining the overall quality of a healthcare offering are the quality of the individual doctors and hospital systems. Virtual-care solutions will ultimately be judged on the same basis, even if people also appreciate their convenience, so the most successful offerings will be those who can attract the best physicians by optimizing the experience and developing compensation models that keep doctors engaged.
For companies with global teams, the holy grail will be a solution that can help employees find local doctors as well as connect with specialists across geographies. This is no easy task given the complexity of health care and regulatory constructs, but large and small players in virtual care are working toward solutions.
Ultimately, virtual care isn’t anywhere near as simple as setting up a video connection between any doctor and a patient, as many people have seen for themselves during the pandemic. Particularly in specialty care, details of clinical architecture are important, such as how a patient’s medical history, records and imaging are organized and routed to a physician; the clinical summary that a physician reviews to be fully prepared for a consultation; and the ability to integrate with a health system’s EHR.
Usability and design are also important, but nothing is so critical as the quality of doctors and the richness of the interaction with the physician that keeps consumers and physicians engaged. In the future, HR teams that build the most effective health benefits packages will have evaluated virtual-care solutions in terms of usability, network quality, experience metrics (i.e., time spent with a doctor) and the user engagement model.
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