Telehealth – Digital IT News

Telehealth Providers Praised for Convenience and Speed, but Experiences Vary

Taylor Graham — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 15:00:15 +0000

Telehealth, once hailed for its ability to overcome socioeconomic and geographic barriers and seen as a crucial tool during the pandemic, is now a focal point in U.S. healthcare delivery. But is it meeting patient expectations? According to the J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Telehealth Satisfaction Study, the results are mixed. While telehealth usage has grown and many patients report positive experiences, not all interactions have been ideal. Satisfaction varies significantly across providers, and questions persist about its effectiveness for certain types of care.

“The telehealth marketplace has grown rapidly and although its usage has been normalized in recent years, we’re still in a growth phase where individuals can have vastly different experiences based on the providers they use, their medical conditions and even things like the quality of internet and phone connections where they live,” said Christopher Lis, managing director of global healthcare intelligence at J.D. Power. “Most consumers agree that telehealth is tough to beat when it comes to convenience and accessing care quickly, but it is not the ideal channel for all healthcare encounters. The wide variation in patient experience is something telehealth providers, insurers and public health officials will want to monitor closely.”

Following are some key findings of the 2024 study:

Overall satisfaction varies widely: Overall patient satisfaction with direct-to-consumer telehealth providers is 730 (on a 1,000-point scale), which is down one point from 2023. Overall patient satisfaction with payer-provided telehealth offerings is 708, up 18 points from a year ago. This wide variation between the two categories of providers and within individual providers profiled in the study suggests that patients are experiencing significant variability in their perceived quality of care and ease of accessing care.
Convenience is king, but barriers persist: The top reasons patients cite for using telehealth services are convenience (65%); ability to receive care quickly (46%); and having a condition that is covered by a telehealth visit (30%). The top barriers making the telehealth experience difficult are internet/cellular connectivity difficulties (25%); limited services provided (25%); and data security concerns with personal/medical information (15%). Overall, 65% of telehealth patients experienced at least one barrier during their telehealth visit.
Biggest gaps in experience: Among specific services in which patients indicate that they would prefer to use telehealth, reviewing medication options and chronic care follow-up are the two areas in which the gap in customer experience is largest. Nearly three-fourths (74%) of those having an easy experience with a medication review said they would use telehealth again, while only 58% who had a difficult experience said they would use it again. When following up on a chronic condition, 44% of patients who had an easy experience said they would use it again, while only 28% of those who had a difficult experience said they would use it again.
Experience varies across socioeconomic and demographic groups: Overall satisfaction with telehealth providers is highest among patients covered by Medicaid, those living in urban environments and those in Gen Y¹ and Gen Z. Satisfaction is lowest among patients covered by Medicare and private insurance, those living in suburban environments, and those in the Boomer and older generations.

Study Rankings

MyTelemedicine ranks highest in telehealth satisfaction among direct-to-consumer brands, with a score of 747. Doctor On Demand(743) and Teladoc Health(743) each rank second in a tie.

Humana ranks highest among payers of health plan-provided telehealth services, with a score of 747. Florida Blue (734) ranks second and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas (733) ranks third.

The U.S. Telehealth Satisfaction Study, now in its fifth year, measures customer satisfaction with telehealth service experience based on seven factors (in order of importance): level of trust; visit with provider met my needs; people; digital channels; ease of receiving care; scheduling of appointment; and helping to save me time or money. The study is based on responses of 4,070 healthcare customers who used a telehealth service within the past 12 months. It was fielded from September 2023 through July 2024.

See the rank chart for each segment at the website here.

In addition to measuring patient perceptions of their telehealth providers ability to meet their expectations, the study also provides a series of measurable and actionable Key Performance Indicators for satisfying patients. Visit the website to see the results.

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¹ J.D. Power defines generational groups as Pre-Boomers (born before 1946); Boomers (1946-1964); Gen X (1965-1976); Gen Y (1977-1994); and Gen Z (1995-2006).

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Virtual Test Administration is the Perfect Fit for Telehealth

Taylor Graham — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 01:53:41 +0000

ABK Remote Drug Testing, Inc., owner of eRAMx Live Remote Drug Testing, and Cynergy Wellness, Inc. announce an exclusive partnership to deliver virtual test administration and result interpretation to the workplace and direct to consumer health screening market. ABK Remote Drug Testing, Inc. is a national provider of physician oversight, medical review officer services, and telehealth.

ABK Remote Drug Testing owner Danny Koester says, “We are confident that pairing the eRAMx patented technology with the expertise of the Cynergy Wellness nationwide physician network will provide employers and consumers with the most advanced, streamlined remote testing platform available in the U.S. today. The past few years have shown a greater acceptance of virtual testing, spurred in part by the challenges posed by the pandemic. Our service expansion, patent pending, in combination with our partnership will create the efficiency, cost savings, and safe access to a wide range of diagnostics, enabling individuals to thrive.”

Angela Moore, CEO of Cynergy Wellness, Inc. says, “Virtual test administration eliminates paid time away from work and lost productivity for applicants, employees, and consumers, delivering unmatched convenience for those challenged by mobility or geography. In as little as 15 minutes, diagnostics historically performed in a traditional clinic setting can now be done from anywhere through a secure mobile connection to a medical professional. We believe our prescriptive authority and virtual test administration through the secure eRAMx technology benefits the individual, the employer, and the medical community.”

The Cynergy Wellness, Inc. physician practice is licensed in all states, processing millions of medical review services and health consultations annually. Combining its industry experience and scale with the eRAMx patented remote drug testing collection technology and PATENT PENDING remote collection for hair, nasal, oral, and blood samples, fulfills a growing demand for remotely administering and interpreting diagnostics for drug testing, Covid-19 testing, blood diagnostics, and many other assessment services for health and related screening.

Dr. Murray Lappe, Chairmen of Cynergy Wellness Inc., is widely known as a pioneer in the development of technology-enabled workplace screening programs. “The acceptance of oral fluid testing methods in both federal and non-federal drug screening programs, along with the rapidly expanding need for access to Covid-19 surveillance in the workplace make virtual test administration a natural fit for our telehealth capabilities.”

Under this partnership, domestic employers and consumers will benefit from a full menu of remote drug screening, Covid-19 testing, and many other health assessment capabilities using live observation and digital record retention. Both laboratory test collection and point-of-care test and result interpretations are conducted by highly trained staff under the supervision of licensed medical professionals.

To learn more visit: RAMx Live Remote Drug Testing or Cynergy Wellness, Inc.

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Veritas Announces Support for AWS for Health Initiative

Taylor Graham — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 09:07:25 +0000

Veritas Technologies, a global leader in enterprise data protection, announced support for the AWS for Health initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate cloud adoption within healthcare.

AWS for Health is an initiative featuring services and solutions from AWS and its Partners, built specifically for healthcare, biopharma and genomics customers. The initiative makes it easier for health customers to select the right tools and partners for their highest-priority workloads. For customers looking to accelerate deployments with solution-specific support, AWS for Health also identifies dedicated AWS health industry specialists, AWS Professional Services teams and leading AWS Partners in each solution area.

As healthcare organizations focused on the COVID-19 national health emergency, many looked for ways to become more agile and scale to reach more patients in need of care. Organizations learned that traditional procurement cycles of buying, provisioning and deploying technology did not move fast enough. Expanded patient access for remote testing centers and then vaccine centers had to be brought online much faster than the several months it would typically take to install on-premises technology. This was further exacerbated in areas that needed surge capacity to support growing inpatient populations. Thousands of caregivers had to switch to work from home overnight and telemedicine quickly scaled to treat millions of patients that may have otherwise not received critical care. For an industry that is governed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and patient privacy, this was no easy task.

Veritas worked in collaboration with AWS to support the healthcare industry. Veritas enabled healthcare organizations to easily move applications to the cloud with confidence. By running on AWS, Veritas enabled hospitals to rapidly scale and securely spin up surge capacity on demand. This allowed healthcare organizations to provide the necessary access to clinical systems for both remote workers and testing facilities. Recognizing the telehealth challenges experienced by healthcare organizations such as hospitals and doctor offices as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Veritas adapted Enterprise Vault, its proven compliance and classification technology that runs on AWS, to help provide supervision and compliance offerings. This helped healthcare customers ensure that their remote workers were following clinical protocols and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for virtual patient interactions, which changed on a daily basis throughout the pandemic.

By leveraging the cloud, Veritas helps make telehealth a sustainable practice, ensuring patient experience quality and satisfaction, treatment protocol compliance and the security of protected health information as required by HIPAA. Using the breadth and depth of AWS services, Veritas enables customers to solve data management challenges across use cases including archiving (Veritas Enterprise Vault); application resiliency (Veritas InfoScale); and backup, migration and disaster recovery (Veritas NetBackup and Veritas Resiliency Platform).

With the most recent version of Veritas NetBackup, customers can backup data to write once read many (WORM) storage on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with support for Amazon S3 Object Lock. This enables healthcare customers to extend data immutability from their on-premises infrastructure to the cloud at petabyte scale for delivering ransomware protection and remediation while minimizing disruption and meeting regulatory requirements.

“AWS has demonstrated a commitment to healthcare and worked with Veritas to support this industry when it needed our help the most,” said Rick Bryant, Healthcare CTO for Veritas. “It is not often that we can tie our solutions directly to helping the country fight something as important as COVID-19, so we are proud to stand with AWS to support healthcare organizations solve its toughest data management challenges across backup, disaster recovery, migration, archiving and application resiliency use cases.”

For more information about the Veritas telehealth offering and Veritas solutions with AWS, please see:

www.veritas.com/solution/healthcare
aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/securing-telehealths-future-with-veritas-and-aws/
www.veritas.com/aws

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