Telemedicine vendor REACH Health recently released results of a benchmark survey on the state of the telemedicine industry in the United States. The 233 survey respondents represented physicians and nurses, administrators, coordinators and other stakeholders, sharing their views about priorities, objectives and challenges, program models, management structures, settings of care, and their telemedicine platforms. Here is a summary of findings.
With a growing population of aging individuals with a variety of health issues, coupled with increasing shortages of specialists, telemedicine is evolving from a specialty offering to a mainstream service. Nearly 60 percent of survey participants identified telemedicine as their top priority or one of their highest priorities for their healthcare organizations.
The maturity of telemedicine programs varies widely among both service lines and settings of care. In general, higher acuity settings that offer more complex and specialized treatment are more mature than lower acuity settings that provide basic levels of care.
While actual implementations of telemedicine programs in lower acuity settings remain relatively low in number, planning and preparation to start these programs are active and widespread, survey results indicate.
Reimbursement, both government and private, poses the primary obstacle to success, according to 70 percent of respondents. Even when effective mitigation of challenges is taken into account, reimbursement continues to present the most formidable obstacle.
Other challenges, however, such as the cost of supporting technology, show encouraging signs of abatement as the industry matures and technology becomes a commodity.
The most common objectives for telemedicine programs are predominated not by financial motives, but rather patient outcomes, access to specialists and leveraging limited physician resources.
Surprisingly, at the top of the list of return on investment drivers is “Improved Reputation,” which is generally seen as a soft benefit for financial performance. This is consistent with both Hub (large or academic hospitals) and Spoke (smaller hospitals) telemedicine models.
The priorities of complementary participants in telemedicine programs, such as Hub and Spoke hospitals in a telemedicine network, in general show a high degree of alignment.
A variety of program attributes were tested in the study and correlated with program success. Some, such as the priority of the telemedicine program as ranked among other hospital priorities, exhibit a predictably strong correlation with success. Others, such as the degree of focus for the program manager, exhibit a surprisingly high correlation to program success-even higher than executive support and adequacy of funding.
Date: May 17, 2015