Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, CEO of KeyCare, tries to make it simple on health systems. His is the first Epic-based online maintenance company, with Epic having the largest market share among EHR suppliers, making it relatively easy for a great many service organizations to launch a telemedicine business. However, KeyCare’s target is simplicity, which means simplicity in quickly and widely expanding a health system’s doctors section. Berkowitz anticipates a lot of change in 2025 from businesses like his that provide health devices with a system of online care providers working on a healthcare system. We interviewed Berkowitz, asking him for his look at the time back in healthcare. He claimed that this year’s benefits from additional physicians working remotely could be significant and would significantly advance the electronic treatment paradigm. Although it should be noted, Congress’s extension of healthcare flexibilities after March 2025 is likely to lead to optimistic estimates. The December 2024 Continuing Resolution with a year-long expansion was dropped, and the subsequent incident expenses just received the improvement until March, which will kick the can further down the road. Q. What is one of the biggest alterations you think healthcare will undergo this time? A. Stage 1 of healthcare is useless. We will continue to see the growth of Telehealth 2.0 this time. The initial stage consisted of isolated healthcare, in which electronic care services were not fully integrated into health techniques. In contrast, Stage 2 of healthcare consists of a re-visioned type of treatment that enables doctors to manage, virtualize and delegate the various less-complex, daily tasks that do not need to be performed via business visits. Virtual providers and non-physician staff members who are empowered to handle firm patients using evidence-based protocols and comparable rules to help manage their attention will be able to accomplish many of these tasks in this world online. Organizations will increase efficiency and improve the quality of care by increasing access and providing more consistent care. Office-based physicians will see fewer, more complex patients themselves, compared to traditional practice workflows, and their patient panels will grow because they will work with a team that treats more stable patients. Health systems will outsource routine care to a tech-empowered virtual care team and expand patient access in a scalable manner rather than struggling to add more doctors in a competitive market. Q. You advise that health systems this year will increase the number of doctors on the telemedicine waiting list. How will this happen? A. By effectively increasing panel sizes, health systems will increasingly work with virtual teams to enhance their doctors ‘ abilities to care for patients. Not a shortage of doctors, but a lack of effective use is the issue. The best way to accomplish this is to implement a virtual team that is connected to the doctor rather than to request more. These telehealth partners will concentrate on virtual care, which is more effective than doctors who can balance in-office and virtual care. No doctor wants to see an increase in doctors ‘ productivity from 22 to 24 patients per day, which virtual care should not be about. Instead, it’s about creating virtual care teams that handle routine care efficiently through automation, allowing office-based doctors to focus on complex cases. This team-based approach will be crucial to sustained success in telehealth. In the end, health systems want to ensure that patients always visit their front door for everything, from routine problems to challenging circumstances. Working with connected virtual care partners, they will start making sure that their access to their health system is as pervasive as any competition, and that the care coordination that results in improved quality. Q. You claim that telemedicine will help health systems achieve greater patient engagement and retention this year. How so? A. Patient wait times are increasing across virtually all medical specialties, which puts patients at risk of worse outcomes and putting pressure on health systems to lose patient volume to rivals like urgent care facilities. Health systems will develop new strategies to increase capacity in order to address these problems by ensuring that their patients have access to timely care. Health systems must actively engage and retain patients in order to prevent leakage and maintain revenue as patients get older and need more medical care. Patients are more likely to seek out alternative medical options when they are unable to schedule appointments with their regular doctors. By embracing virtual options for routine care, as well as urgent but minor issues such as rashes and ear infections, health systems can increase capacity, reduce wait times, and provide relief to busy, overworked clinicians. Health systems must prioritize actively communicating all of their virtual care options to patients in order to ensure the success of their virtual care initiatives. Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on Linked In: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss .org
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