You Asked: What Area Do You Think is Ripest for Innovation During the Pandemic? We Listened.
Answered by: Richard Proscia, Sr. Associate, Providence Ventures
The Providence Ventures team recently asked our followers: What area do you think is ripest for innovation during the pandemic? You responded, albeit a little divided, with a split vote between solutions for providers and solutions for patients.
And we couldn’t agree more.
Our team believes that one of the most important elements in the continuum of care has been fundamentally disrupted by the pandemic and is among the ripest for innovation — the patient-provider relationship, or what we at Providence refer to as the Sacred Encounter.
Pre-Pandemic Trends
Even before the pandemic, the Sacred Encounter had begun to take a backseat as health systems prioritized workflow effectiveness, margin improvements, and the incorporation of technology, particularly electronic health records, into their care. In fact, before the pandemic, patient satisfaction with traditional care models had declined significantly. This dissatisfaction was driven by several factors including long scheduling timelines, inconvenient locations, long waiting room times, and limited physician interaction. In terms of accessibility, in 2018, patients waited an average of 24 days for an appointment with a primary care physician, with even longer wait times for specialists. This lack of accessibility was further compounded by the minimal (and dwindling) physician facetime afforded to patients, with the average visit in 2018 lasting just 17.5 minutes.
Physicians, similarly, were increasingly dissatisfied with their work environment, which has often led to burnout. These physicians were working longer days filled with shorter patient interactions and a seemingly ever-increasing amount of administrative responsibilities created by the deployment of electronic medical records. In a 2020 study by Medscape, 46% of primary care physicians, and 44% of internal medicine physicians reported burnout, citing demanding work schedules and an emphasis on profits over patients as key contributors.
All these factors in the pre-pandemic environment created an opportunity for solution providers to leverage technologies and workflow innovations to improve upon the new realities of the patient-provider encounter.
Pandemic Driven Acceleration
In a matter of weeks, COVID-19 abruptly disrupted the delivery of modern medicine, requiring providers to deliver a diagnosis and prognosis outside the four walls of a traditional care setting. Although the adoption of telehealth technologies was progressing prior to COVID, the pandemic has been the catalyst for a massive industry transformation and has created incentives for industry participants to move faster. While numerous metrics exist demonstrating this rapid growth in telehealth solutions, a key illustrative metric for Providence Ventures has been the explosion of virtual tools and capacity within Providence. After receiving the first confirmed case of COVID in the United States, Providence was swift in adopting and scaling telehealth and remote monitoring technologies, with over 12,000 providers onboarded and virtual visits exploding to over 13,000 per day. For those patients that tested positive or were presumed positive, in less than a week, Providence rolled out a home monitoring program that allowed patients to report symptoms using a digital engagement portal powered by a basic thermometer and pulse oximeter.
As these tectonic plates continue to shift in response to the COVID-19 crisis, the impact of these trends will undoubtedly change the way patients access care in the future. PV expects to see further changes in incentives and reimbursement, some of which have already been announced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Our team expects telehealth to continue to gain market share, particularly from lower acuity visits (out of convenience) as well as other visits where physical interaction is not required, all driven by changes in consumer and caregiver behavior, long-term reimbursement trends, and realized efficiencies.
However, current technologies in place pose inherent limits on what physicians can accomplish during virtual-only encounters, exposing providers to both risks in quality and experience (including trust) as well as gains in efficiency. During the crisis, health systems were forced to self-educate themselves about how to leverage readily available technologies in order to meet immediate patient needs. As the initial wave of the crisis subsides, health systems and providers have already begun to replace these “stop-gap” technologies with long-term solutions that enable better and more efficient care as consumer expectations rise and convenience wears off. What could be perceived as subtle changes in behavior will have a profound butterfly effect on how healthcare is delivered. With most patient-provider encounters now captured in a digital setting, there has never been a greater opportunity to capture unique data. PV believes that virtual care settings enable previously underutilized technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to finally focus on penetrating more patient care segments and specialties. Conversely, this opportunity also presents a unique challenge for providers and health systems that will now have less physical interactions with patients, and will need to either bring telehealth visits to “efficiency parity” with traditional in-person visits through new innovations or develop new ways to make the fewer traditional visits more productive from an information-gathering perspective.
Conclusion
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to drive patient and provider utilization of telehealth solutions across the entire care continuum, PV believes there is a growing need to identify and build technologies that enhance, extend, and advance the patient-provider relationship. Furthermore, the need to preserve and instill trust in the “Sacred Encounter” between a caregiver and patient will never be greater. As care delivery shifts to a more telehealth centric model, solutions must ensure these visits are as productive or more productive than a traditional in-person patient visit. Ultimately, through new innovations and technologies, telehealth visits will likely replace any visit where physical interaction is not a prerequisite for care, unlike a surgical encounter.
Follow us at @ProvVentures for more insights about healthcare investing.
