While telemedicine was making inroads into healthcare before COVID-19 struck, the pandemic has unleashed its potential, according to a panel of medical leaders speaking at the 2020 GeekWire Summit.
Instead of building new physical clinics, digital tools allowed healthcare organizations to deal with this crisis in a much different way than the 1918 flu pandemic, said Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, executive vice president and chief clinical officer at Providence.
“It actually allowed us to think differently and to reimagine what healthcare could be,” she said.
Before the pandemic, the Providence network of providers delivered 70,000 telehealth visits last year. By the spring of this year, it was providing 70,000 visits per week. The nonprofit is on track for 1.6 million remote visits this year.
The pandemic helped raise awareness and demand for the remote delivery of healthcare, but even more important, said the panelists, was the pressure it put on government regulations and the insurance industry to support telehealth. That included changes in licensing rules and coverage of telemedicine by Medicare and private insurance companies.
Response to COVID-19 is also pushing the system toward a different payment structure for healthcare that focuses on healthy outcomes versus the number of services provided. By offering subscriptions to healthcare — an approach used by telehealth companies such as Seattle’s 98point6, which just raised a $118 million investment round — patients have access to “all you can eat” primary care, rather than paying for individual appointments.
“A subscription model is the best way to allow patients to have essentially unlimited access, high levels of access — they can come back when they want,” said Dr. Brad Younggren, chief medical officer at 98point6. “There’s a doctor essentially in the home of those families 24/7 and especially in COVID-19, what we’ve learned is this is a really a reassuring thing for families.”
Other panelists were Dr. Ian Tong, chief medical officer for Doctors on Demand, a San Francisco-based telehealth company, and Dr. Amy Mezulis, who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is co-founder and chief psychologist at UpLift, a Seattle startup providing digital mental healthcare. The Thursday afternoon session was moderated by T.A. McCann, managing director of Pioneer Square Labs.
The speakers shared how the pandemic inspired some specific tech innovations:
- Doctors on Demand had a 400% increase in demand for services. It responded by creating a virtual doorman or bouncer to screen patients. Those who were low risk of COVID-19 infection, for example, were sent to a webinar for information, while a high risk patient was connected to a doctor. The approach prevented patients being shunted into a digital waiting room for eight hours without any care.
- Providence partnered with Microsoft to create a chatbot to screen for COVID-19 and began making greater use of remote monitoring for hospital out-patients, allowing them to convalesce at home with family while still receiving oxygen and tracking vitals such as blood pressure and temperature.
- 98point6 altered its AI to screen for COVID-19 and adhere to changing government guidelines, while also hustling to create a protocol for COVID-19 home testing.
- UpLift sped up development of a platform for mental health therapists, going to market in April, months ahead of its planned fall release.
And while there’s a lot of consumer interest in tech gadgets to support health, such as wearable monitoring devices, the panelists were more excited about innovation to help doctors and other providers do their jobs more easily and efficiently. Natural language processing tools, for example, can be used to monitor communications and detect red flags for patients at risk of suicide, or can be used to analyze patient-provider interactions to find missed opportunities for treatment. The hope is to provide better care and avoid burnout in the medical profession.
“A lot of people approach [technology] as, let’s try to do what the doctor does and try to replace the doctor’s brain. And I think those are fun experiments and if we can do that really well, that’s going to be very helpful one day,” said Tong. But he said right now what matters more is innovation that can help doctors sift through “the mountains of data” in a patient’s record and making sense of it.
The good news, the group agreed, was that the positive changes to healthcare that have been driven by COVID-19 should be lasting and continue to evolve. There’s really no other path.
“If we tried going back, if we said, ‘no this isn’t the way we’re going to do it,’ then Amazon is just going to come in and do it for us,” Compton-Phillips said. “So we as an industry better figure out how to keep going forward.”
