We also broke through many regulatory barriers.” Can pandemic-era changes last?ĭuring the height of the pandemic, providers and insurance companies introduced a variety of changes to improve payment mechanisms for telehealth. Clinicians realized improved clinical efficacy.
“Many organizations recognize the adoption of telehealth broke through a number of glass barriers - financial reimbursement, clinical adoption, and consumer adoption. “All that said, 1% to 12% is a heck of a jump,” Gilbert said.
In December 2021, for example, telehealth claims accounted for 4.9% of medical claims nationally, compared to 0.2 percent in December 2019.Īs COVID-19 fell out of the top five telehealth diagnoses nationally, other diagnoses rose substance use disorders, for example, reentered the top five nationally in the Midwest and moved from fourth to second place in the Northeast. In fall and winter 2021, however, telehealth utilization rose again as the Delta and Omicron variants led to increased COVID-19 cases.įurther, even though there has been a decline since the peak months of 2020, telehealth utilization has remained much higher than before the pandemic. For example, in spring and summer 2021, telehealth claim lines dropped as vaccination levels increased. A study by Fair Health, titled " The Evolution of Telehealth during the COVID-19 Pandemic," revealed there may have been many telehealth use fluctuations over the past two years, but those were often related to the course of the pandemic. Tracking telehealth use from January 2020 through March 2022 shows that although there was a sharp rise in spring 2020, use has declined since, according to Fair Health, a non-profit organization that tracks telehealth use. The decline in telehealth happened for several reasons, but mainly because patients understood as the pandemic eased they could once again go to a physical office to see their primary care physician, specialist, behavioral health therapist, or other medical provider. In California, we’re at a 20% steady state. “Over time, we hit a steady state of 12%,” Gilbert said.
And HIPAA data privacy rules were relaxed to enable the use of consumer video apps such Apple’s FaceTime and Microsoft’s Skype as a temporary means of connecting doctors and patients.Īfter making significant gains during the pandemic, however, telehealth use has significantly receded in the past year the number of Americans using electronic devices to interact with healthcare providers dropping precipitously, according to Gartner. The US government has continued to fund efforts to establish telehealth as a more efficient supplement and, in many cases, alternative to in-person visits. Changes to government regulations of telehealth systems, most notably the expansion of insurance reimbursement by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to cover telehealth appointments enabled rapid adoption. In first few weeks of the pandemic, however, the percentage of virtual healthcare visits jumped to 52%, according to Mark Gilbert, senior director analyst for Healthcare Strategy at research firm Gartner. “In that five weeks, there was no time for strategic planning or business cases there were no time for, or any of that stuff that goes into normal procurement process of a technology platform,” Gilbert said.
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