ABSTRACT
The study identifies characteristics of the explosive implementation and scale of telehealth use in the first year of COVID-19 pandemic - forever changing traditional healthcare practices and patient access in the United States. To view the article, please visit DOI https://doi.org/10.30953/tmt.v6.280 The award selection is based on the number of online views, article downloads, citations, and market impact. Authors and affiliations appear below: Francis X. Campion, MITRE Corporation;Atrius Health;and Harvard Medical School Stephen Ommen, Mayo Clinic Helayne Sweet, MITRE Corporation Nilay Shah, Mayo Clinic Barbra Rabson, Massachusetts Health Quality Partners Nick Dougherty, Allways Heath Partners Jennifer Goldsack, Digital Medical Society Peter Sylvester, MITRE Corporation Karen Jones, MITRE Corporation Aaron Burgman, MITRE Corporation Nathalie McIntosh, Massachusetts Health Quality Partners Lindsey Sangaralingham, Mayo Clinic David Jiang, Mayo Clinic Jeffrey McGinn, Change Healthcare Ricardo Rojas, Mayo Clinic Tim Suther, Change Healthcare Brian Anderson, MITRE Corporation John Halamka, Mayo Clinic (Dr Halamka is editors-in-chief of the THMT journal) Congratulations, authors!
ABSTRACT
Each year, Telehealth and Medicine Today asks experts in the field to share their insights into the future and predict how telehealth will influence uptake and healthcare in the new year.
ABSTRACT
Obtain a detailed perspective from the principal investigator of this landmark telehealth study paving the way for understanding gaps and to allow telehealth best practices to emerge, creating a more effective and resilient system of care delivery in the U.S. The COVID-19 Telehealth Impact Study was designed to describe the natural experiment of telehealth adoption during the pandemic. Using a large claims data stream and surveys of providers and patients, studying all 50 states to inform healthcare leaders. Biography Francis “FX” Campion serves as Principal Lead for Digital Health at MITRE with work focused on AI for healthcare, FHIR interoperability and the use of synthetic data for clinical modelling. He is a co-principal investigator for the COVID-19 Telehealth Impact Study. He serves as clinical consultant to the U.S. Government for the Federal COVID Response for Therapeutics. He is a practicing internal medicine physician at Atrius Health in Boston. Prior to work at MITRE he served as Senior Clinical Informaticist at IBM Watson Health where his team built machine learning and natural language processing applications for care of patients with diabetes and heart failure. Prior to that he served as the Chief Medical Officer for Ayasdi providing AI solutions for providers and payers. There he co-authored the book, “Machine Intelligence for Healthcare.”
ABSTRACT
Importance: This three-part study characterizes the widespread implementation of telehealth during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving us insight into the role of telehealth as we enter a stage of “new normal” healthcare delivery in the U.S. Objective: The COVID-19 Telehealth Impact Study was designed to describe the natural experiment of telehealth adoption during the pandemic. Using a large claims data stream and surveys of providers and patients, we studied telehealth in all 50 states to inform healthcare leaders. Design, Setting, Participants: In March 2020, the MITRE Corporation and Mayo Clinic founded the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition (C19HCC), to respond to the pandemic. We report trends using a dataset of over 2 billion healthcare claims covering over 50% of private insurance activity in the U.S. (January 2019-December 2020), along with key elements from our provider survey (July-August 2020) and patient survey (November 2020 - February 2021). Main Outcomes and Measures: There was rapid and widespread adoption of telehealth in Spring 2020 with over 12 million telehealth claims in April 2020, accounting for 49.4% of total health care claims. Providers and patients expressed high levels of satisfaction with telehealth. 75% of providers indicated that telehealth enabled them to provide quality care. 84% of patients agreed that quality of their telehealth visit was good. Results: Peak levels of telehealth use varied widely among states ranging from 74.9% in Massachusetts to 25.4% in Mississippi. Every clinical discipline saw a steep rise with the largest claims volume in behavioral health. Provision of care by out-of-state provider was common at 6.5% (October-December 2020). Providers reported multiple modalities of telehealth care delivery. 74% of patients indicated they will use telehealth services in the future. Conclusions and Relevance: Innovation shown by providers and patients during this period of rapid telehealth expansion constitutes a great natural experiment in care delivery with evidence supporting widespread clinical adoption and satisfaction on the part of both patients and clinicians. The authors encourage continued broad access to telehealth over the next 12 months to allow telehealth best practices to emerge, creating a more effective and resilient system of care delivery.