Relentless Health Value

Let’s talk about provider organizations and telehealth. It’s just too common a refrain amongst provider organizations who say some combination of: Our patients and/or clinicians don’t like telehealth. Telehealth is too expensive for us to do ... unless maybe we should charge facility fees for telehealth visits. Telehealth is risky to invest in because as soon as payers start paying less than 65% of in-person visits, we’re gonna drop it anyway. These things are said despite the overwhelming popularity of telehealth in almost any large-scale survey that you’ll find. It seems like largely the only entities reporting that patients and clinicians don’t like telehealth are provider organizations who haven’t adequately invested in telehealth at the systematic/strategic level. Therefore, the only thing their anecdotal evidence about telehealth really seems to show is the negative impact of phoning it in—which is no one wanting to phone in (pun unintentional but, you have to admit, kind of great). All of this is goi