Many people agree that integration improves healthcare and health outcomes. Widespread integration itself, however, remains elusive; and closing the gaps between providers, health systems, and areas of access seems – at times, with traditional delivery models – nearly impossible. Yet, at the Telemed Leadership Forum 2018 (hosted by URAC and Telemedicine Magazine), telehealth emerged as an obvious and practical path to an integrated healthcare community.
Telehealth enables expedient provider-to-provider consultations, allows patients greater access to care, and permits the sharing of electronic medical records – all of which give a patient a chance at better care than unlinked health systems have been able to offer. Ultrasound machines that plug into smartphones, apps delivering patient information to providers at the press of a button, and even the average phone call, put telehealth capabilities in hand.
How do we capitalize on these readily available resources to improve health outcomes and promote cost-effective care? Simple: to use the tools that will integrate our healthcare system, we ourselves must integrate. Communities of interest promoting telehealth – such as the one formed at the Telemed Leadership Forum 2018 by providers, URAC, C-suite executives, payers and innovators – must align their efforts to demonstrate to key players that telehealth is not an obstacle, but an opportunity. Where there are still such forces resisting introduction of the telehealth care delivery mode, there is no true integration.
Adam Darkins, MD, a well-respected neurosurgeon, and president and CEO of Empiricon LLC, noted in his keynote speech that until the manufacturers of railroad gauges collaborated to establish a standard product for railroad tracks, trains and their cargo were relegated to delivery within state lines, thereby inhibiting interstate commerce. Much like railroads, only when we collaborate to create one standard for telehealth care delivery will we be able to break the barriers to integrated and more cost-effective care. We must coordinate to produce successfully integrative telehealth tools; if our systems only work inside the microcosm of a single hospital, health system, or even state, there is no true integration.
In other words, if telehealth’s communities of interest – its collection of greatest advocates – can collaborate on their efforts to effectively demonstrate its value, integration will not remain elusive. URAC is in a unique position to continue to cultivate the communities of interest initiated at our Telemed Leadership Forum. The opportunity is immense – stakeholders at the conference from telehealth start-ups, to well-established integrated delivery systems, to academic medical centers (both pediatric and adult) to rural access hospitals, payers and pharmacists, all believe in telehealth’s value as the cornerstone to clinically integrated networks.
Telehealth accreditation offers an effective tool in the journey to integration. This is what we do best: promoting leading practices and instilling quality through our work with stakeholders across the healthcare continuum. URAC’s telehealth accreditation program, along with intentional efforts to foster telehealth communities of interest promoting evaluation and research, can serve as a path to supporting this vision for widespread clinical integration.
I’d like to thank the Product Development Team for their contributions to this article.
