The University of Kansas Health System

Stephen Kropp

The first telehealth/telemedicine connections date back before the Apollo program in the 1960’s. (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health: Crossing the Telemedicine Chasm:  Have the U.S. Barriers to Widespread  Adoption of Telemedicine Been Significantly Reduced?, LeRouge, Garfield)Biometric data captured in space was beamed to earth and interpreted.  Although the ability to conduct telehealth encounters has been available for over 60 years, the force multiplier of a global pandemic now requires health care facilities all over the world to become over-night experts in the provision of digital health.

Patients who were reluctant to trust the image of their provider in a two-dimensional telehealth screen are now demanding the convenience of care when and where they determine.  A myriad of health care systems across the U.S. completed their two to five year digital-care plan in a matter of days, in some instances less than 14 days to seamlessly provide the needed care for chronic, acute, and dependent patients.

It is as though the mother of invention was able to shorten the 9-month gestation period to one day and hundreds of thousands of synchronous video visits were spun-up at lightning speed. Fortuitous vendors savvy enough to have invested in solid telehealth hardware and infrastructure such as  Teladoc, Health Recovery Solutions, Zoom, Vivify, Doximity and many others saw their stock and company net worth skyrocket.  Visionary health systems were rewarded handsomely if they had listened historically to the whispers of innovation and digital transformation allowing them to, integrate a telehealth platform into their existing EMR.

Primary care, specialty care and ancillary services such as tele-rehab, speech language pathology, ePharmacy and digital lab services are forging new workflows in this digital-horse-race and the horse is not headed back to the barn

What this means for the next iteration of digital health care is intimately dependent on how in-tune legislators and the insurance commission is to the “New Normal” in health care.  State and federal legislators can deliver a strong show of support for their constituents by stabilizing reimbursement and insuring telehealth parity in every state in the union.  In a good midwestern term, the “telehealth” horse has left the barn while patients and providers are working to build models of care including Remote Patient Monitoring for acute and chronic patients.  They are envisioning Hospital at Home networks allowing lower acuity patients to recover at home when appropriate vs. being admitted as inpatients.  Primary care, specialty care and ancillary services such as tele-rehab, speech language pathology, ePharmacy and digital lab services are forging new workflows in this digital-horse-race and the horse is not headed back to the barn.

Information Technology and electronic medical record infrastructure is evolving to incorporate every form of digital health care I just mentioned, and venture capitalists are scrambling to invest millions of dollars into digital health R&D.

In Daniel Burrus’s book, “The Anticipatory Organization” he defines those hard trends in our society that not only predict the future, but they also guarantee certain things to happen. (Hard trends are future facts, and will happen) Three hard trends that predict the further advancement of digital health care are: 

• Technology – Virtualization, mobility, data analytics, artificial intelligence and the use of the cloud and social technologies will continue to grow in impact and importance.  Genomics will increasingly be used to personalize medicine.

• Demographics – There are more than 78 million baby boomers in the United States, and they will continue to get older.  None of them will get any younger. That is a certainty.  That is a hard trend.

• Government Regulation – Regardless of political or philosophical persuasion, we are going to have more government regulation in the future – not less.  And this is true for every country.

Healthcare Systems embracing these hard trends and building care models to serve the population efficiently with the proper balance of technology/telehealth, they will be national and global leaders in the care and management of patients.