It is no surprise that telehealth has made improvements in the last few quarters. However, it can be surprising to see that there has been many difficulties in receiving payments from these telehealth meetings. A second difficulty that many healthcare providers have had to accommodate during the COVID-19 pandemic is the issue of receiving payments. In April 2020, overall telehealth utilization for office visits and outpatient care was 78 times higher than in February 2020.
Investor activity too has continued to skyrocket during this telehealth implementation, but so does the pressure on companies within the industry to reinvent themselves and find successful models that display competitive advantages in this new frontier.
Innovations around this lateral care (both primary and specialty health systems) enables care at home through remote patient monitoring and self diagnostics, as well as investments in digital gatekeeping for experimentation with hybrid online/offline models.
Increased Patient Preferences towards Telehealth
Telehealth’s popularity was enabled by a few factors. There has been an increase in positive consumer attitudes to telehealth, as well as provider willingness. Not to mention regulatory changes creating a need for greater access and reimbursement. Indeed, telehealth has offered a reinvention of virtual/in-person care models. It’s been extremely helpful in improving healthcare access, outcomes, and affordability.
While these improvements are wonderful for patients and providers in their main responsibility, financially, it has created some issues for those looking to seek reimbursement. Now that patients are out of the office, receiving their payments has been a headache for many healthcare offices around the world. Most health systems are having difficulty monitoring and managing their patient reimbursement. Those in bed capacity-constrained environments and value-based care arrangements are looking to understand whether there is scalable volume decanting or cost savings potential at equivalent quality.
Downfalls of Telehealth
These new innovations have created even larger problems with backed-up accounting systems in overwhelmed healthcare provider systems. The rapid influx and change of billing methods have left many scratching their heads and worrying investors. There needs to be better data integration and data flows to optimize these new systems. Better integration of virtual health-related activities into day-to-day workflows is an improvement that must be addressed. As well as the alignment of incentives for virtual health activities with the larger integration toward value-based care, and erasing the fee-for-service mentality.
With Credence Global Solutions Telehealth Billing Made Seamless
Potential does exist! The need to improve access, quality, and affordability of healthcare, as well as engage the lottery economic opportunity represented by telehealth. Those in the Industry like Credence Global Solutions, have recognized this need for patient payment processing. We introduced our patient engagement platform, iConnect. iConnect’s abilities allow for a healthcare patient engagement platform with automation and an intelligent AR workflow to help maximize cash and patient satisfaction.
Healthcare automation is here. iConnect makes it easy and convenient for patients to pay their bills in a single tap, by utilizing and implementing this patient processing platform, telehealth can be as convenient for patients as it is for providers.
