More than half of healthcare executives are already witnessing success with encouraging outcomes and improving patient satisfaction. Also the uncertain future of the ACA is seen to be making telemedicine even more important.
According to a survey, hospital executives are gradually prioritizing telemedicine for the purpose of delivering medical services as the Healthcare industry shifts to value-based care from fee-for-service.
The report, conducted by Reach Health, revealed that 51 percent of hospital caregivers and executives gave telemedicine a high priority, while 36 percent graded it as a medium priority. Interestingly, only 13 percent responded that telehealth is a low priority today.
The study titled “2017 U.S. Telemedicine Industry Benchmark Survey,” also questioned 436 executives and caregivers about telemedicine projects that were already highly successful. Nearly half of the respondents ranked improving engagement, outcomes and satisfaction as successful, 26 percent of the respondents said that attempts to reduce costs were highly successful, and 18% of the respondents said the same about decreasing readmissions.
Reach Health further identified challenges large practices face with telehealth programs. The top five were found to be Medicaid reimbursement, Medicare reimbursement, inadequate telemedicine parity laws, lack of common EHRs in hospitals and private payer reimbursement.
When asked about the approach provider organizations took to telemedicine, 39 percent reported it’s a business approach, where telemedicine attempts are centrally accomplished across settings of care and service lines. Furthermore, 36 percent of the respondents said they took a departmental approach. In this approach telemedicine initiatives were initiated and managed by individual departments. Twenty-five percent stated they initiated with a departmental approach and were in the middle of transitioning to a business model.
With Congress debating the launching of legislation designed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, hospital executives revealed how the new laws may affect the importance of telemedicine: 33 percent amongst them said it would enhance the importance of telemedicine, 3 percent of them stated that it would actually decrease, 38 percent opined that it would stay about the same, and 26 percent said that they couldn’t predict.
