Benefits of Telehealth Apps for Service Providers & Patients

April 6, 2021

The benefits of telehealth apps have begun to change the way healthcare is viewed across the globe. Giving more control in the hands of the service providers and the patients, through remote monitoring, enabling sharing of data, and remote treatment. Telehealth is becoming synonymous with convenience quality access to care and improved mechanisms to conduct provider-patient interactions.

Though further improvements are underway which include virtual health-facilitated through robotics and automation, providing greater convenience for service providers by relieving them of mundane operational tasks, administrative work, and recurring assignments, much of the benefits offered by existing services are mostly unknown to the general public.

Applying innovative practices into healthcare has opened up a world of endless possibilities from using virtual assistants to manage and schedule appointments to processing prescription orders, transcribing clinician notes automatically, and accessing medical records with ease.

All these factors are helping remove social and economic barriers from the existing system so that more time is spent on quality healthcare provision.

As more progression is made in digital and telecommunication technologies to facilitate the healthcare sector, new sub-branches of telehealth are emerging. Previous literature attempted to bring clarity between the differences associated with telehealth and telemedicine among the general masses by defining telehealth as a broader scope of remote health care services that also takes into account telemedicine. Since then, innovative remote healthcare practices such as telepsychiatry, teledermatology, teleophthalmology have started picking traction in various parts of the globe.

According to the recent Deloitte analysis of hospital revenue trends, it has been recorded that over the last several years, hospital inpatient revenue has been decreasing due to a clear shift towards virtual settings.

How Important Are Telehealth Apps During The Current Pandemic?

With social distancing and remote working becoming a widespread phenomenon globally, more and more efforts are being invested to keep health and safety at the heart of all activities for people of all ages. With an increase in concepts like work from home, remote schooling, and online shopping to avoid physical grocery shopping, the pandemic has also caused a massive acceleration in the use of telehealth services and applications.

Many healthcare professionals had been benefiting from telehealth services for decades but the current COVID-19 conditions have brought a surging upwards due to the benefits it has to offer such as remote monitoring, consultation, and treatment. As per the recent consumer survey by Mckinsey “consumer adoption has skyrocketed, from 11 percent to a staggering 46 percent in 2019 of US consumers using telehealth”.

Service providers have also started experiencing the benefits of telehealth apps and its rapidly scaled offerings – witnessing a sharp increase in the number of patients from 50 to 175 times via telehealth in comparison to the past.

Before the advent of Covid-19, healthcare stakeholders were experiencing an annual turnover of approximately 3$ billion with a major focus on virtual urgent care but as the demand began to increase due to pandemic crises, the consumer and provider adoption of telehealth and extensions of telehealth grew with now estimated to be worth $250 billion.

The demand is likely to increase with each passing year hence scaling telehealth should not halt due to the likelihood of covid-19 vaccines being introduced globally. Telehealth is the most effective way to provide greater access to necessary care for patients in remote areas, increase convenience for patients to access care when they need it, and receive affordable quality healthcare. Solutions offered by remote monitoring and treatment are more efficient, can reduce the cost of care as well as provide potential increases in provider productivity.