Emerging HCIT: Telehealth and More

Needless to say, the last six months have been quite a ride for most people in general—especially those in healthcare.

KLAS began gathering data for the Emerging HCIT Companies 2020 Mid-Year Update back in January, but much of the information in this report is based on provider reactions to COVID-19.

Before the pandemic hit, many providers were engaging in maybe two or three telehealth visits per month—a miniscule percentage of their overall visits. In March, that percentage shot up to 100% in some places, putting a big strain on everybody to ensure that patients could be seen.

Telehealth usage has remained fairly high in many places, and we have seen that usage reflected in the searches on KLAS’ website as people have searched for telehealth vendors and technologies.

Beyond Telehealth

But telehealth isn’t the only hot topic we have noticed. KLAS has done some research regarding robotic process automation (RPA), specifically with revenue cycle.

Organizations are using bots to eliminate manual labor and repetitive tasks. A script can just run and search databases. It can do things that used to take staff members a lot of time to do.

Many people are also trying to use social determinants of health (SDOH) to help with population health and value-based care. Healthcare is no longer just about going to the doctor to get prescription refills.

Providers can use SDOH data to identify barriers to a patient’s health and wellness, such as food insecurity, homelessness, or lack of transportation.

Many vendors are trying to help care providers identify those gaps in care and then connect the patients to community-based resources to help solve the problems that providers haven’t traditionally been able to help with.

What KLAS Is Doing

SDOH and RPA are two examples of high-interest areas for healthcare organizations.

KLAS has already done several Spotlight reports for RPA (Boston Software, Colburn Hill Group, Olive, UiPath) and SDOH (Algorex, Aunt Bertha, Healthify, Signify Health, NowPow, Unite Us) that may interest you. More are sure to come (such as one for Carrot Health) as interest in these segments continues to rise.

The data in the report represents provider reactions and insights from January 2020 to June 2020, so more has happened since we finished gathering the data.

We are excited to see what the next six months may bring. Check out the full report and stay posted for more updates and Spotlights.

 
     Photo Credit: Adobe Stock, Feodora