Amwell Says Re-Platforming Is Driving Increased Use of Its Telehealth Tools

Telehealth is seeking its new place in the healthcare mix after its star turn during the pandemic, as evidenced by the performance of telemedicine provider Amwell at the end of 2022.

During the company’s fourth quarter 2022 earnings call on Wednesday (Feb. 22), Amwell Chairman and CEO Ido Schoenberg directed most of his comments at the re-platforming to its Converge solution, saying that visits on Converge grew from 16% of total visits in Q3 to 28% of total visits in Q4 ended Dec. 31.

Citing retention of key clients, including Elevance Health and Northwell Health, Schoenberg said, “It is increasingly clear to me that we made the right decision to re-platform our solution,” adding that, “Digital-first care is rapidly becoming the main highway for a variety of care modalities offered by all types of providers and services, and our role in this evolution is a significant one.”

Data from PYMNTS’ February study “The ConnectedEconomy Monthly Report: Digitally Divided — Work, Health and the Income Gap” found an income-based divide in consumers using digital healthcare, reporting “high-income consumers are now twice as likely as low-income consumers to use digital to access healthcare services. An average of 59% of high-income consumers used digital to access healthcare services or communicate with their providers in January 2023 — up from 50% in January 2022. Just 35% of low-income consumers used digital to access healthcare services or communicate with their providers in January 2023 — up from 32% in January 2022.”

Get the Study: The ConnectedEconomy Monthly Report: Digitally Divided — Work, Health and the Income Gap

However, Schoenberg said Amwell’s Converge platform approach “resonates with health systems which are prioritizing digital care to achieve important goals around staff burnout, retention, new sources of revenue, and streamlining workflows.”

Outlining 2023 priorities, he said, “We will strive to ensure the successful migration of our remaining provider clients onto Converge, and deployments for payer clients have already begun,” adding that large and complex deployments are accelerating digital care delivery plans for systems signed to the platform.

CFO Robert Shepardson noted that Amwell ended the fourth quarter with “over 107,000 active providers representing growth of over 11% compared to a year ago. As a subset, active providers employed by our clients grew 12% over last year. We anticipate that our number of active providers will continue to rise as we migrate and implement existing and new clients onto our Converge platform.”

Shepardson said total platform visits in Q4 were about 1.7 million, an increase of 10% compared to Q4 2021.

See also: Amwell Says Future of Telehealth Will Go Beyond Video Visits

“Urgent care visits drove most of this increase in what was the first real flu season since the onset of the pandemic,” he said, adding that “this surge in on-demand urgent care visits resulted in scheduled visits being 63% of the total, down from a prior range of 70% to 75% over the last couple of years, but still up significantly from approximately 30% pre-COVID,” he said.

He said that in Q4, “successful migrations drove visits on Converge for the quarter to 28% of total, and that number has continued to increase during Q1 (2023).”

Additionally, Shepardson noted that in 2022 subscription revenue growth was positively impacted “by the inclusion of a full year of revenue from our 2021 acquisitions of Silvercloud and Conversa and was challenged by the temporary impact on bookings we had expected while we focused on completing the Converge build out, successfully migrating our existing client base, plus strategic client deployments.”