Outcomes and Questions in the Telehealth Performance Report

At the beginning of the pandemic, providers selected and used telehealth solutions that they could implement quickly and easily. Now, we're starting to see providers looking at telehealth not just as a necessity like in 2020 but as part of their organization’s go-forward strategy for 2022 and beyond.

At KLAS, we want to better understand what customers’ experiences are like and the outcomes they see with their various telehealth platforms. Our recent Telehealth Performance 2022 report analyzes recent provider feedback on these solutions. We asked about the patient experience in the first telehealth report, and in this latest report, we followed up on the patient's experience and then asked about the provider's experience. As such, these insights should be particularly helpful for providers as they solidify their plans around their go-forward telehealth solutions.  

Seeing Tangible Outcomes

We hear about a lot of outcomes both internally for providers and externally for their patients as well. Some of the outcomes that providers talk about with telehealth solutions include increasing patient access to care and improving time to care.

Reducing time to care in an ambulatory setting can include convenient access to an appointment without travel. For example, for inpatient scenarios, this can mean offering lifesaving specialist care to patients experiencing a stroke or other critical conditions.

Another outcome is reducing missed appointments. This is an important element that helps providers keep up necessary revenue.

Virtual Care Platforms vs. Video Conferencing

In this report, we see further validation on the use cases for virtual care platforms and video conferencing solutions.

Providers are considering how these virtual care solutions can fit into their wider care offerings. There are basically three categories of telehealth solutions that we measure:

• Video conferencing solutions. These solutions tend to be more integrated with patient records, schedules, and billing. They are often fairly simple to use and approach.
• Virtual care platforms. This technology often offers more advanced workflows, capabilities, and integration in addition to video and audio. These are more likely to be used in complex inpatient settings.
• EMR-centric platforms. These are also known as telehealth solutions offered by EMR vendors. These solutions tend to be more integrated with patient records, schedules, and billing. Because this technology was the focus of our recent EMR-Centric Virtual Care Platforms 2022 report, we did not include them in this performance report. We recommend looking at that previous report for more information.

Multiparty Capabilities and Additional Questions

This report captures the provider or customer experience of those using these solutions. In addition, it covers the ability of these solutions to handle multiparty scenarios.

Multiparty capabilities are a significant component of provider telehealth strategies as they can involve interpreters, family members (which may only be a few people), or group therapy (which can include many more people). Each of these situations has important factors for providers to consider when looking at various solutions.

As we look forward to ongoing telehealth research, we plan to dive into the specific considerations providers are weighing as they decide on their go-forward telehealth solutions. We also continue to monitor how these solutions evolve around EMR integration, connectivity quality, ease of use, and other workflows.

Challenges to Overcome

Telehealth has been proven to offer real benefits to providers and patients but also raises new questions and challenges. Issues of patient digital literacy and access, the need for frontline technical support and EMR integration, and wider questions around virtual care strategies generally continue to be top of mind.

To be able to move forward, vendors and providers alike need to have a continued focus on both physician and patient experience. They need to take the time to consider the ways a telehealth encounter mirrors an in-office encounter and the ways it does not.

More on Performance

The telehealth market is at an exciting crossroads, and we know that having these capabilities will continue to be important for healthcare organizations wanting to better engage with their patients in the future.

The bulk of this report is in the vendor profiles where we provide a summary of each vendor and include customer commentary. We invite you to read the report to get more in-depth information on specific vendors’ performances.

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