‘Telehealth 2.0’ Will Blur Lines Between Virtual and In-Office Care

Starting a healthcare practice is a costly, protracted process that takes 15 months and $15 million by some estimates just to get up and running. It’s utterly out of step with pandemic-era needs.

With everything — including healthcare — moving to omnichannel approaches using platform efficiencies and capabilities, it’s an ideal moment for modernization of a vital sector.

The shift to connected healthcare is being championed by a growing number of innovators, including Wheel, whose founder and CEO, Michelle Davey, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster “the very beginning of what we call ‘Telehealth 1.0’ was really just mimicking an in-person visit and bringing it online. Now virtual care is going much further than just telehealth.”

That crosses into lab work and diagnostics, with clinicians going into patient’s homes, absorbing nonverbal and environmental clues that patients/consumers may or may not want to articulate.

“Through telehealth, we’re getting to see into the homes of patients for the first time ever,” she said. “We’re seeing clues from around the house, from their environment. We can see things like temperatures in the home. We’re getting a lot more data points than we were [from] inpatient, and we’re using those to make the right treatment and care [plans] for patients.”

That approach pairs well with the ability to match consumers/patients with the right clinician, whether it’s one and done for a case of the flu or the longer-lasting relationships some patients prefer.

See also: Amazon Care Goes National With Hybrid Virtual and in-Home Model

Practicing ‘Webside Manner’

Building a national network of physicians and clinicians into an on-demand hybrid telehealth/in-home model is a colossal undertaking, requiring a great deal of training and monitoring.

“We surface those numbers internally and check on all of the quality assurance behind the scenes,” Davey said. “We’re making sure that the clinicians are delivering the best care and that the patients are happy with that care.”

The hope is that by adhering to this form of care, patient satisfaction rises, physician/clinician reimbursements increase, and some of the “urgent” is taken out of healthcare delivery.

“A lot of healthcare in this country hasn’t been [focused] on wellness and preventative care,” she said. “With virtual care, we’re seeing a lot of that evolve. We’re seeing health and wellness companies add virtual care offerings to their platforms or applications so that the patients who are pre-patients — they’re just consumers at that point — are getting access to care from clinicians.”

She said that amounts to preventative medicine, improving cost, experience and efficiency.

Read also: Senators Push Bill to Keep Telehealth Medicare Coverage as Private Insurers Lean Into Virtual

Care Anywhere

Having completed a $150 million Series C fundraise in January, Davey said she sees telehealth — another pandemic stopgap — as quickly becoming the first stop in many patients’ journeys.

Within the next five years, she told Webster, most healthcare will start online as patients turn to the convenience of telehealth to navigate the complexities of the system and pinpoint the exact care they need.

With its platform “healthcare from anywhere” value prop, Davey said she sees Wheels as one of the digital-first companies at the vanguard of that dramatic shift in how healthcare is done.

Quality assurance is central to the reliability of healthcare organizations, and it’s been baked into Wheels’ business model too, as newly forming virtual-first practices must be trusted.

“Quality care is a big part of Wheel,” Davey said. “We have an entire organization that just focuses on the quality of care that’s delivered. Most hospitals pull 1% of all charts and do audits on that. We do over 10% of our visit chart audits, so a really large amount of quality assurance is going behind the scenes to ensure that highest level of patient care is delivered.”

Some clinicians on the Wheel platform do that full time, “but two-thirds of our network are practicing inpatient care as well,” she said.

“They are coming online for additional hours that they may have, or for time to come online to see patients virtually,” she added. “What that enables Wheel to do is access a whole different level of clinician that still has an in-person practice.”

“The future of healthcare is hybrid, and so the future of the clinician workforce is also hybrid,” Davey said. “We’re enabling that journey and ensuring that the clinician is supported along the way.”

See also: Digital Healthcare Use Surged 2.9% in December 2021 on Fears of Omicron