What’s striking now is how remote patient care has become more accessible than ever before. Chronic illness treatment, endocrinology, rheumatology, gastroenterology, psychiatric counselling and overall long-term care — all have become more available in recent times.
Last December, the Mental Health Telemedicine Act expanded access to mental health services by means of telemedicine. This growth of services offered skyrocketed due to rising demand during the pandemic.
However, this level of consumer adoption hasn’t always been the case. Before the pandemic, one of the major obstacles to developing the telemedicine market was reimbursement restrictions. This meant most telehealth services weren’t covered by health insurance. To add insult to injury, such services couldn’t always be rendered across state lines.
With little demand to evolve and adapt software and systems to new requirements and circumstances, the supply of telemedicine software was nowhere near its current diversity. Just over a year ago, the legacy constraints of insurers and short demand for purpose-built software seemed to signal that little would change on short notice.
To support social distancing, restrictions on telemedicine have since been relaxed. Forty-three state in the USA, as well as Washington, DC, currently have a telehealth commercial insurance coverage law. Compared to 2019, when just 11 % of the US consumers relied on telemedicine, now there are as many as 46%, according to McKinsey.
Technical Challenges
Never before did telemedicine have such favorable conditions for market growth. However, new opportunities pose new challenges. From my experience, successful delivery of telehealth services hinges on crucial IT factors such as software security, software compliance and data interoperability, apart from hiring professional doctors.
Building and maintaining such an IT infrastructure can be rather costly, especially when budgets are being cut and competition from other telehealth providers is increasing. For many, growing an in-house IT team is still viable, though a great deal of telehealth companies have turned to smartsourcing instead.
According to the 2019 Risk: Value report, 40% of the healthcare and pharmaceutical companies consider security skills and resource impact to be the factors affecting their IT decision-making in the next 18 months.
Apart from the ever-present issue of cloud migrations, most telehealth providers are concerned about the organizational inertia that still lingers. The pandemic has ramped up the latent efforts that were in development. And now, more than ever, what telehealth service providers need is to keep up with the fast pace of change and prepare their IT systems for the journey ahead.
Trends For The Future
The prospects for building on the tremendous results of the last year are infinite in a post-pandemic world. Apart from managing chronic diseases and maintaining mental health, telemedicine is projected to encompass even more diagnoses, treatments and services.
Such projections can’t be brought to fruition without proper technical support and skill. And the scale of technical tasks will only increase in the future. In the U.S. in 2021, projections show at least 20 to 30% of all care will be delivered by means of telemedicine. It raises the budgeting, hiring and onboarding issues more poignantly than ever before.
The overall tendency to expand the range of services, provided by telemedicine will undoubtedly fall on the shoulders of a larger number of specialists. For healthtech and biotech enterprises — as well as SMEs and startups — this should already signal the need for further capacity building, be it in building up and upskilling core IT teams, onboarding younger specialists or bringing in outside help.
Naturally, for many, this will come down to expendable resources: Do you make cuts to last a little longer, make a serious commitment with a managed team, go agile or take things slow and focus on growing junior talent in the hope that it will tackle? Many companies have already made big trade-offs, and more will surely come. On a brighter note, the current landscape seems to offer more opportunities for growth, rather than pitfalls.
A solution could be in building up the capacity of core IT teams to execute best on the depth of previously acquired knowledge and the strategic heavy-lifting. Meanwhile, managed service providers can be utilized for background tasks, repetitive tasks such as cloud infrastructure, security and systems management. Some core IT teams may even benefit from the occasional infusion of on-demand consultancy from experts.
It’s clear that telehealth companies will need to rely on a few serious commitments or an agile approach, besides a healthy mix of talent tactics, to create a platform for dealing with challenges that affect industries on a global scale. Implementing scalable solutions will be key to driving digital transformation.
Telemedicine has already served thousands of patients and has helped ease overcrowding in ER rooms, optimizing the invaluable time of medical staff and their overall load. Smart sourcing might just be the way forward owing to the relevant expertise that guarantees consistency in provided solutions and reduces potential risks, all the while keeping an eye on quality and further growth.
Source-Forbes.com
