With the onset of the COVID pandemic, telehealth usage soared as consumers and healthcare providers quickly found new ways to access and deliver healthcare safely in a virtual environment.
“The fundamental promise of technology is that it allows us to live a better life. This is where health and technology come together with incredible power. The future of health and technology is a future where healthcare consumers, and all of us are less confused and more certain. We’re less hesitant and more empowered. Less self-conscious, more capable and confident. Cutting edge science is paving the way for new treatments (improving) health for individuals and for society.”
Robert Ford, CEO, Abbott
According to insights from McKinsey, in 2021, the use of telehealth increased 38 times from the pre-COVID baseline. Four key factors enabled its success and popularity:
- An increase in provider willingness to offer telehealth
- An increase in consumer willingness to use telehealth
- The technology behind new communication platforms and solutions to enable the delivery of telehealth
- Regulatory changes allowing greater access and reimbursement
However, there are still some challenges in the United States, creating barriers for telemedicine to reach its full potential.
Telehealth challenges beyond COVID
The 2021 Global Future Health Index Report reveals a resilient future for telehealth, with 64% of global healthcare leaders investing heavily in virtual healthcare.
The United States (89%), the Netherlands (83%), and Saudi Arabia (81%) are currently world leaders in the push for ‘anytime, anywhere’ healthcare.
The question is, will virtual healthcare services diminish as the COVID crisis continues to weaken in severity? Let’s look at the main challenges faced by the telehealth industry:
Challenge #1: Inadequate technological infrastructure
A reliable technological foundation, including high-speed internet and widespread access to mobile devices, is crucial to telehealth delivery. However, the addition of virtual care systems has put a serious strain on organizational networks, with large bandwidth demands due to increased audio, video, and data streams.
There is also the challenge of managing the influx of patient data that virtual care generates. Healthcare leaders cite two critical issues as the most significant barriers to the adoption of digital health technologies:
- Lack of interoperability, that is, the ability of multiple technology platforms to seamlessly connect and share data in real-time
- Difficulties with managing data standards across technology platforms
Challenge #2: Inequalities with digital and health literacy
Approximately 16% of Americans are digitally illiterate, equating to nearly 32 million individuals. For virtual healthcare to benefit everyone equally, consumers need to be familiar with specific technical skills. This can be challenging to some patient groups.
A patient’s ability to use the video conferencing software during a telehealth consultation is one thing, but often, they cannot troubleshoot problems that crop up with their device or connection.
Most issues are not related to the software – rather, they’re related to the device, network, or internet connection. Across healthcare, 42% of patients say the effort to connect with their provider was the biggest barrier to communication. For telemedicine to succeed, access needs to be equal and managed effectively. Otherwise, new obstacles, such as digital and health literacy, will exacerbate this already high statistic.
Challenge #3: Inconsistencies with devices and connections
Therapy-based telehealth services usually require patients to use their own computer, tablet, or phone. The challenge here is the disparity in ownership, quality, and condition of these personal devices.
For example, a speech pathology session would almost certainly not work as well on a mobile phone as on a high-end laptop. Yet, 26% of the U.S. population doesn’t own a desktop or laptop. Even smartphone ownership isn’t as ubiquitous as one might imagine. 15% of Americans don’t own a smartphone, and within the 65+ age group, nearly 30% own a cell phone that isn’t a smartphone.
The reliance on personal devices for telemedicine could limit access based on device ownership and potentially mean that patients with better quality devices may receive better quality care.
Video and audio quality is another issue. Home/office internet connections were not fundamentally built for video calls. Streaming content uses different bandwidth than conducting a video call, so Wi-Fi interference can cause important consultations to freeze mid-call or drop out altogether.
And to begin with, not everyone has internet access. In areas where broadband is available, 100 million Americans do not have a subscription. In addition, 6% of the U.S. population lacks broadband access altogether, heavily concentrated in rural and tribal areas, which also likely have the highest healthcare access challenges. The disparity between internet access and strength could significantly affect telehealth’s impact.
Image source: Global Future health index
Optimizing technology for digital transformation in healthcare
Today, many healthcare leaders prioritize investment in technology to enable their hospitals or healthcare systems to facilitate telemedicine delivery.
They also say their hospital or healthcare facility will be implementing predictive healthcare technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to prepare for the future. AI technologies that predict clinical outcomes will likely play a key role in enabling healthcare systems to deliver value-based care.
Across new and existing technologies, real-time insights into the key health indicators of your communications ecosystem are critical. This enables organizations to identify and address problems before they can have a serious impact. Here are some of the most crucial issues facing unified communication (UC) systems and how monitoring, testing, and performance management solutions can help solve them:
Network congestion
Monitoring tools can identify and clean up network bottlenecks and see user endpoints, allowing real-time remediation to keep teleconsultations high quality and on schedule.
Lack of visibility
Convenient, deep visibility across your entire communications environment enables fast problem resolution, pinpointing the exact reason for appointment problems and even preventing them from occurring in the future.
Poor voice quality
Performance management can address latency, jitter, and dropped packets, which can cause an inconsistent quality of voice communications and potentially distress patients. Remedying these issues before they impact the end-user is vital to ensuring a good patient experience.
Future-proofing infrastructure
Most hospitals and healthcare systems rely on a complex technology environment. Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, and Zoom platforms, as well as various SBCs, gateways, servers, and other critical UC components – ensuring performance management across multiple vendors, platforms, and use cases not only allows for the optimization of the current UC environment but future-proofs the tech stack.
Proactive testing
With proactive voice, video, and web testing, you can identify the gaps between actual system performance and how you think it’s working. Proactive testing minimizes the potential for disruption while ensuring a seamless, omnichannel patient experience.
Prevention vs. cure
Just as healthcare providers are tasked with the health of their patients, IT and operations teams have the burden of keeping complex unified communications systems up and running. The future of telehealth depends on functioning technology – not just some of the time, but all the time.
Because a significant component of telemedicine is phone and video consultations, optimizing technology is an important priority for healthcare organizations. Lives depend on it.
Monitoring, troubleshooting, and overall performance management are the insurance that keeps the telemedicine industry working, compliant, and effectively managing risk. But it’s more than that.
Healthcare systems need complete visibility into their entire network and communication ecosystem. They need immediate access to data and real-time analytics and alerts. They need customized dashboards that can pull data from wherever they need it and provide an all-encompassing view of the entire system from a single pane of glass.
As technology becomes further embedded in health systems and services, it’s mission-critical that every component of the ecosystem is healthy and optimized for long-term high performance. so that you can improve outcomes and continue to provide the critical care so many patients need.
