A report has highlighted four key areas to drive greater telehealth adoption and deliver value-based care more widely.
The Future Health Index (FHI) report, commissioned by Philips, analysed the challenges of telehealth services around the world. The FHI is a research-based platform designed to help determine the readiness of countries to address global health challenges. The report focuses on telehealth as a driver of change in the transition to value-based healthcare and universal health coverage.
It shows that despite the ever-growing number of case studies linking telehealth to more effective care and lower costs, the adoption landscape is mixed.
Telehealth, the provision of healthcare remotely through telecommunications networks, has the potential to increase access to healthcare, drive better outcomes, reduce costs, ensure healthcare professional satisfaction, and improve the patient experience – five factors that indicate the success of value-based care systems.
Four recommendations that were highlighted for potential improvement in the report were:
- Build the financial case for telehealth implementation
- Ensure telehealth implementations go beyond the technical
- Develop a common language
- Base telehealth on recognition of differences
The report indicates that connected care technology is already a reality in specific parts of the healthcare system in radiology (teleradiology) and pathology (digital pathology), where it allows the sharing of medical images for better diagnosis, treatment, follow-up and workload distribution. It is also beginning to be used in general practice (telemedicine), remote patient monitoring and the tele-Intensive Care Unit (tele-ICU).
Jan Kimpen, chief medical officer for Philips said: “Telehealth is the ultimate example of connecting people, data and systems so that everyone, wherever they are in the world, can access a quality of care that enables them to live a healthy and fulfilling life. In radiology and pathology, especially in the diagnosis of cancer, telehealth solutions are already helping clinicians to make first-time-right diagnoses that allow patients to get the right treatment, in the right place, at the right time. At the same time, the ability to share content knowledge with colleagues anywhere in the world makes clinicians’ own lives more rewarding and satisfying. The Future Health Index report goes a long way to identifying what needs to be done to make the same happen in many other areas of care where telehealth has the potential to improve the lives of patients and caregivers with sustainable solutions.”
The ‘Future Health Index: delivering value across institutional and geographical borders’ report highlights many successes in telehealth, such as its role in implementing the tele-ICU – an intensive care unit where critically ill patients, who could benefit significantly from the opportunity to detect adverse events earlier, can be remotely monitored 24/7 or on a consultative basis by clinical experts located within regional, national networks or in different time zones.
However, it also reveals that the rate of adoption of telehealth solutions worldwide is still relatively slow, even in the radiology community where less than half (39%) of the radiologists surveyed stated that they use connected care technologies in their practice. This slow rate of adoption is also evidenced by World Health Organization (WHO) figures, which indicate that only 22% of countries have national telehealth policies, and by the 2018 FHI report finding that only 31% of the countries surveyed by the FHI had clearly defined rules governing the collection, protection and sharing of data.
In total, the report identifies five key factors that are potential barriers to widespread telehealth adoption: outdated reimbursement and payment models, cultural attitudes, lack of financial incentives, restrictive policies, and inadequate technological infrastructures, such as broadband access.
The report ends with a statement that, as with other aspects of connected care, success in telehealth will ultimately be based on the involvement of multiple actors – healthcare professionals, the general population, payers, regulators and the private sector – along with people.
