19 Mar Digital Health Care is on the Uptake, but 4 Hurdles Remain

By: Brian Eastwood
Source: MIT Management Sloan School

For years, advocates of digital health have touted the potential of video visits, phone calls, emails, text messages, and smartphone apps to provide more convenient and accessible care than in-person visits to brick-and-mortar hospitals and clinics.

As recently as February 2020, however, virtual visits still represented fewer than 1 in 250 health care visits, according to FAIR Health, a research organization that looks at commercial health insurance claims. (Virtual visits are a specific type of digital health encounter in which a physician sees a patient electronically.)

That changed virtually overnight as COVID-19 spread across the United States. With stay-at-home orders in place, and with hospitals limiting in-person care to emergency situations, virtual visits skyrocketed to 13% of all insurance claims in April 2020. That figure has dropped since, but virtual visits continue to make up more than 5% of health care visits, FAIR Health’s data shows.

“2020 was a transformative year for our industry. Consumer behavior has fundamentally changed in light of the pandemic,” Anmol Madan, PhD ‘10, chief data scientist for telehealth company Teladoc Health, said during a panel discussion during last month’s MIT Sloan Healthcare and BioInnovations Conference. For example, use of the Teladoc virtual visit platform for mental health visits grew 500% in the 12-month period ending in February 2021.

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