Telehealth participation continues to grow, study finds

Having cleared some of its logistical hurdles, more doctors are participating in telehealth today, which has also proven valuable to companies and venture capitalists.

Dr. Shira Fischer is a physician policy researcher at the RAND Corp. who has conducted surveys related to telehealth.

“Doctors hadn’t provided it as an option previously because the infrastructure and technology weren’t widely available,” Fischer told Voice of America earlier this year.

In February 2019, less than 4% of the respondents said they used video telehealth, Fischer said. Two years later (during the pandemic), it was 45%.

The American Medical Association found in 2021 that a majority of physicians “enthusiastically embraced” telehealth and expected to use it more often with 85% saying they used telehealth to care for their patients.

Separate figures show that consumers have become accustomed to telehealth and use it routinely.

Consumer participation in telehealth on at least a monthly basis reached between approximately 30% and 40% of patients through January 2022, just under the roughly 50% share with monthly in-person visits, according to a recent report from proprietary research prepared for the PYMNTS’ April ConnectedEconomy Monthly Report.

Both figures held relatively stable throughout 2022 and 2023, albeit with telehealth trending up and physical visits trending down over the most recent months, PYMNTS said.

Investors are finding telemedicine to be a profitable venture for participating businesses. UnitedHealthcare and its Optum unit saw growth last year in its home health offerings and is on track to serve 4 million patients in 2023, nearly double that in 2021, PYMNTS said.

Venture capital firms are fundraising for healthcare-related startups. Patient21 recently received $108 million in Series C funding to expand its digital software platform.

Servicing the provider side, OpenLoop raised $15 million in Series A funding for its white-label telehealth support platform in March. It provides care for US hospitals, retailers, pharmacies, retailers, and health systems.

PYMNTS’ Karen Webster and Sesame founder and CEO David Goldhill, discussing the topic, said in a prepared statement, “There are no pediatricians at 9 at night, and if you have young kids, as I do, there are no pediatric problems for some reason that exist during the day — 100% of them exist at night for evolutionary biological reasons none of us understand …

“We regularly criticize innovation for not working for all 325 million people 100% of the time. That’s one of the reasons we have so little consumer-directed innovation in healthcare. The reality is that video medicine creates broader access for a lot of people for a lot of conditions a lot of the time in a way that didn’t happen before.”