- According to a report published by Klas Research, healthcare providers after months of experimented approach and trial and error with new platforms, are equipping themselves with virtue care assistance for their post-COVID operations.
- A survey conducted with 277 organisations found that almost a quarter of people responding want to aggressively replace their platform or feel unsatisfied with it. Respondents also said that even though lesser in number but powerful enough tools are present today to match all the telehealth needs of the future - particularly from inpatient organizations.
- The report also highlighted that video conferencing vendors are amongst the most exposed because replacing them will be a fairly smooth process.
The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled the healthcare providers and clinicians across the country to turn to the available digital tools to continue providing routine care along with experimenting with varied other platforms to see what best can be delivered as virtual care. Klas research found that while most of the healthcare providers use the telehealth capabilities with a blend of multiple IT options to meet their virtual care necessities.
The Klas research categorised the virtual care vendors into 3 groups - video-conferencing platforms, EHR-centric virtual care platforms and non-EHR virtual care platforms for determining the provider opinions. Non-EHR virtual care platforms are healthcare centric with their focus on offering multiple visit types, patient scheduling, check-in, virtual waiting rooms and other healthcare workflows.
According to the report, Amwell and Teladoc’s InTouch are the primary players even though only a few customers plan to use them to meet their telehealth needs of the future. Klas researchers said that, “Amwell after a recent partnership with the Google Cloud, has struggled to scale to growth and maintain enough support with its customer satisfaction slowly declining since 2018.”
The respondents rated their highest satisfaction for the non-EHR virtual care platforms with Caregility at the top followed by TelaDoc’s InTouch, VSee, MDLive and Amwell. Subsequently, researchers asked about video conferencing platforms used for clinical cases. The results showed that of the 30% of the respondents using Zoom and Doxy.me said that they will not stick to these vendors for long and are looking for systems with better integration and simplified clinical experience which suggests that they are looking to switch their EHR vendor options in the future. While Microsoft was the differentiator with its newly developed healthcare-centric capabilities for Teams, Vidyo performed the worst as a video conferencing platforms.
The last category was the EHR-centric virtual care platforms which involved patient portals that enabled for scheduling, documentation and billing that can also be done natively or via an EHR integration. According to the report, both Epic and NextGen also scored high for respondents overall satisfaction as strong EHR integration was enjoyed by the clinicians.
The users of Epic have often more complex needs though, while all respondents said that Epic will be core to their telehealth strategy with less than half considering it as their sole vendor. Over 80% of the respondents using NextGen said they will use Virtual Visits offering acquired from OTTO Health as their only source of telehealth technology. These customers consistently reported a positive feedback from the patients receiving a link directly via an email and were able to easily launch into a visit.