The Telehealth Era Is Just Beginning – Insights from Kaiser Permanente & Intermountain Healthcare [executive summary]

Full implementation of five opportunities would improve clinical quality nationwide by 20%, increase access to care by 20%, and reduce health care spending by 15% to 20%.


Harvard Business Review
by
Robert Pearl, Brian Wayling
From the Magazine (May–June 2022)


This is an Executive Summary of the publication above. For the full version of the original article, please refer to the original publication.


Executive Summary

by Joaquim Cardoso MSc
Health Revolution Institute

Telehealth Revolution Unit
April 16, 2022


What is the context?

  • Contrary to what many people think, virtual health care, also known as telemedicine or telehealth, is much more than a cheap digital knockoff of in-person care.

  • When used appropriately, it improves patient health, reduces costs, and makes care more equitable and accessible to anyone with a smartphone.

  • Its use has soared during the Covid era — and the authors argue that providers around the world should aggressively strive to tap its full potential even after the pandemic abates.

What is the message?

In this article the authors take an inside look at two of telemedicine’s earliest adopters and most effective users:

  • Kaiser Permanente, where one of us (Robert) was CEO; and

  • Intermountain Healthcare, where the other (Brian) is an executive director of telehealth services.

For more than a decade these integrated health systems have used virtual care platforms to improve preventive medicine, care coordination, chronic disease management, and affordability for more than 13 million patients.


What are the 5 opportunities?

  • Opportunity 1: Reduce Expensive and Unnecessary Trips to the ER
  • Opportunity 2: Reverse America’s Chronic-Disease Crisis
  • Opportunity 3: Address Disparities in Health Care
  • Opportunity 4: Make Specialty Care Faster and More Efficient
  • Opportunity 5: Provide Access to the Best Doctors

What is the business case?


Full implementation of five opportunities would:

  • improve clinical quality nationwide by 20%,
  • increase access to care by 20%, and
  • reduce health care spending by 15% to 20%.

What are the barriers?


In many countries, barriers in the form of regulations, payment regimes, and patient acceptance remain.

Any nation seeking to raise health care quality, increase access, and lower costs should be expanding, not contracting, the use of virtual care.


What does it take?

  • The authors outline what’s needed to spur adoption to a fully telehealth-driven system.

  • The resulting savings could amount to tens of billions of dollars a year.

Who should lead the way?

  • Employers, who currently provide health insurance coverage to nearly half the U.S. population, could drive such a change by banding together and designing new reimbursement and care delivery approaches

Originally published at https://hbr.org on May 1, 2022.

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