Evolving Telemedicine
How modern technology and data science can enhance telemedicine.
By Tom Terry, Matt Edwards, & David Bagatelle
The recent unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the benefits and limitations of telemedicine and the need for continued investment in this arena, increasing access to more individuals in quicker, safer ways. The challenge with this is ensuring proper triage of symptoms, diagnosis of conditions and development of appropriate treatment plans.
At Slalom we believe leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) is key to evolving telemedicine.
Integrating AI allows increasing personalization of evidence-based preventative care, diagnosis and assessment of individual treatment plans, while simultaneously decreasing costs through the entire value chain and supporting a healthier population.
In the past decade, wearable device adoption has increased dramatically, from the Apple watch to fitness trackers, more people across the globe are measuring everything from their sleep patterns to heart and respiratory rates. While the use cases for integrating this data into the healthcare system have been growing, COVID-19 has driven a number of clinical trials to integrate this data into the diagnostic process as well as identify viral illnesses in a community.
Now imagine that same information was included as part of the analysis of a patient during a telemedicine visit enhanced with voice analysis, image/video analysis, and electronic medical history providing a more robust and complete picture of the individual patient’s current state.
Layer in analysis and integration of the latest, most up-to-date information in evidence-based preventative care, diagnosis and treatment plans and medical professionals now have the tools they need to make more accurate diagnosis and target personalized treatment plans a reality.
Outlook for telemedicine
Telemedicine, or a virtual consultation, has been around in one form or another for years, but as technology has become more ubiquitous, its use has grown rapidly.
Through the use of improving technology, the ability to provide adequate care has improved, and telemedicine as an engagement method has become more widely available, with an estimated 91% of midsize to large employers in the US offering this service via their benefit plans in 2020. Yet, prior to COVID-19, less than 2% of plan participants used those services.
With the rise of the current pandemic, a lot has changed. In an effort to increase access to healthcare and reduce exposure for both patients and healthcare workers, the federal government modified billing and insurance restrictions allowing medical professionals to charge, both directly to patients and insurance carriers for most virtual services. Many healthcare practices immediately moved to seeing all of their patients virtually. Boston Medical Center went from rarely using the technology to using it with ~1,500 patients per day, completing the switch in about 48 hours.
Current capabilities
Telemedicine is generally available through phone, chat and video. Outside of this current crisis, it has become a way for people to get the immediate engagement and feedback needed from a medical professional, while retaining office visits when immediate physical action is required.
Providing these medical professionals with diagnostic tools powered by AI would augment this experience deepening their understanding of the patient’s overall health and risk factors providing an even richer experience for patients and providers alike. Organizations are already beginning to look at ways to enhance the diagnosis experience using machine learning, such as the work being done by the American Cancer Society to analyze cancer cells and identify high risk patients more rapidly to determine the right treatment plans as well as the response to treatment and change direction if necessary.
As people become more comfortable with this type of interaction — it is expected that telemedicine will become the method of choice as the first interaction to get a diagnosis; a quick and easy way for patients to get the care they need.
Future capabilities
Although the telemedicine experience has expanded over the years, opportunities still exist to evolve the experience driving quicker, more exact and improved outcomes. With enhanced data from Personal Health Record (PHR) and Electronic Healthcare Record (her) systems, AI and Machine Learning (ML) could improve care by guiding medical professionals to likely causes and proposing appropriate evidence-based treatments.
Combining traditional inputs with additional data, including facial recognition and voice sentiment analysis data, can transform with the diagnosis process. Data from wearable devices could, with user permission, be shared with medical professionals to guide diagnosis, and provide methods to auto-monitor response to treatment plans potentially providing insight to changes needed over time.
AI is already being considered for medical purposes outside of telemedicine, such as reviewing MRIs and CT scans. And while it has not become the normal mode of operation yet, it appears inevitable that AI will become a tool for even complex diagnosis. Models can be run alongside human review, posing no additional risks to the patient. And it will only be a matter of time before a model proves able to identify certain types of issues more quickly and accurately.
AI is not a panacea and must be implemented in a thoughtful and deliberate manner. Machine Learning models are only as good as the data used to train them and can have errors and biases. Healthcare is complex, symptoms can be similar and the combination of different conditions could be hard to identify, which reinforces the need for medical professionals to remain a critical component of the process and be the ultimate arbiter on diagnosis and treatment. In addition, empathy, compassion and human interaction between medical professionals and patients are essential to the physical and mental wellbeing of patients.
At Slalom, we believe it is imperative to provide medical professionals with every tool possible to make their job easier and enhance the ability to provide effective healthcare to a broader segment of the population. Medical professionals deserve sophisticated tools, grounded in improved and enhanced data and information, allowing them to focus more time on personalized care with patients at the center of their practice.
At scale, we believe these capabilities, commercially available for all medical professionals, insurance providers, government and research organizations that wish to take advantage of them, will not only evolve telemedicine but create healthier communities around the globe.
Medical community reactions
Several people in the medical community are understandably skeptical about what is possible, as technological advancements in healthcare have been relatively slow to materialize. At Slalom, we propose continuing to drive ahead with improvements acknowledging it’s not a cure-all and evolution will not occur overnight.
We encourage both skeptics and optimists to reach out and join the conversation about how to evolve telehealth and empower medical professionals with AI-powered virtual technology tools. If you would like to learn about our approach to building these capabilities visit our AI Center of Purpose, or reach out to us here at Slalom Strategy. (strategy@slalom.com)
We look forward to the conversation!
Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Our healthcare and life sciences industry teams partner with healthcare, biotech and pharmaceutical leaders to strengthen their organizations, improve their systems, and help with some of their most strategic business challenges. Find out more about our people, our company and what we do.
