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December 2022
I was fortunate to participate in a small meeting on digital health hosted at LA Bioscience November 17, 2022. Motivated in part by recent acquisitions such as Amazon’s purchase of OneMedical and Oak Street’s of Rubicon, and in part by what seems the obvious trend, I spoke about the increasing omni-channel nature of digital within healthcare. What follows is abstracted from that presentation.
Digital health’s future is increasingly omnichannel. Wikipedia defines omnichannel as:
"Omnis" is Latin for "every/all" and here suggests the integration of all physical channels (offline) and digital channels (online) to offer a unified customer experience.
The important takeaway is the integration of digital with physical channels. And one place to see this is in telehealth usage. The following graph from Chartis shows telehealth usage as a percent of physician visits in the United States between January 2020 and July 2022.
The large spike in early 2020 was for telehealth replacing in-person visits due to pandemic restrictions. The graph shows the declining telehealth share of physician visits which is likely a function of consumer preference, clinical realities and potentially payer support. But in addition to these obvious causes, what is happening behind the data is more thoughtful use of telehealth; it’s use in follow up visits or rehab instead of acute care visits. For example, one suburban/rural specialty practice I have spoken with has seen telemedicine visits plummet to sub 5% of their visits. They are in a subspecialty where both patients and clinicians prefer in-person for critical visits; however, they see a growing demand for post procedure follow up visits through telehealth.
Recent research from CVS Health further supports that patients want an integrated care journey. Their 2022 Health Care Insights study shows the following results:
This points to a broader definition of the patient experience and mapping not just digital or in-person visits, but determining where each channel is appropriate for the specific interaction. The good news is that there are experts in this omnichannel experience from many industries. I was fortunate in my time at WW to receive vary valuable insights from experts with experience in hotels, theme parks and other industries. We now need to harness this multi-sector approach even more into healthcare.
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