Healthcare organizations are faced with myriad pressures ranging from controlling costs to dealing with labor shortages, addressing changing consumer dynamics and maintaining patient loyalty.
The good news is that virtual care has the potential to help address all of these issues.
At a Teladoc-sponsored session at the Becker's 10th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, Tony Burke, SVP, client partnerships & innovation at Teladoc Health, facilitated a discussion with two colleagues about the opportunities and challenges associated with digital healthcare:
- Kim Swafford, global virtual health lead, Microsoft Health
- Tim Wright, SVP strategic partnerships, Teladoc Health
Three key takeaways were:
1. Applying technology to suboptimal workflows is definitely not a recipe for success. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many health systems pieced together technology solutions that were poorly designed for the underlying processes. "These were band aids or additions to existing workflows which didn't address the consumer or provider experience," Mr. Wright said.
Now that organizations are in a more stable period, they must re-examine their structures and processes. Only then can technology truly be an enabler. "Virtual health includes more than the synchronous visit," Ms. Swafford said. "It includes remote patient monitoring, digital front door and other capabilities."
2. Teladoc and Microsoft are partnering to transform virtual care. Teladoc focuses solely on virtual care. It provides online employee healthcare benefits to employers, a virtual care platform for health systems and other provider organizations and a direct-to-consumer behavioral health solution called BetterHelp.
Microsoft is looking at virtual health as a platform, rather than a series of point solutions. "We are looking at four main components in our Cloud for Healthcare: consumer engagement, health team collaboration, clinical analytics and the clinician experience," Ms. Swafford said. "Our goal is to help organizations transform the data they already have to a drive higher level of integration across the care continuum."
Through their partnership, Teladoc Health and Microsoft have several co-innovation streams that leverage Teladoc Health’s clinical expertise and solutions and Microsoft technologies like Nuance, Microsoft AI, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. "In dialog with Microsoft, we have identified the problems we need to solve, looked at our assets together and combined them to create world-class enterprise solutions," Mr. Wright said.
3. By leveraging technology, healthcare organizations can do more with less. Teladoc and Microsoft are using a platform approach to solve critical healthcare problems. For example, providers can use the same services with a single UI experience throughout the patient journey, whether an individual is in the emergency room, ICU or at home. "One of our big missions is to leverage technology to do more with less," Mr. Wright said. "For example, if you already have a Microsoft Teams license, you don't need to buy anything new. You just need to implement it in a different way."
"We can't maintain the status quo any longer — 53 percent of hospitals have negative operating margins while clinician burnout is high and patient engagement is low, it may get worse before it gets better," Ms. Swafford said. "The opportunity to change healthcare is here and now. We must leverage data and technology to develop new models of care that better serve our patients and clinicians"
Mr. Wright and Ms. Swafford agree, that it isn’t a question of if this change will happen, it will be when and who can do it best. They believe the collaboration between Microsoft and Teladoc can help accelerate that transformation.
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