What does Amazon have to do with healthcare? What Amazon has done to the retail sales industry with its digital presence is very similar to what telemedicine is doing to traditional healthcare providers via digital. Is your organization ready for the change?
As consumers increasingly demand virtual healthcare services—virtual provider visits, digital communications with providers via email, texting and video—the competition with brick-and-mortar healthcare facilities will increase. Virtual healthcare will never overtake physical locations completely, but the balance between the two is definitely changing, as more employers are making telehealth services available and more consumers prefer telehealth to traditional office visits.
Healthcare executives are reacting to this change. As reported in GreyMatters earlier this year, a survey of healthcare executives found that 83% of respondents are planning to invest in some sort of telehealth services or are very likely to do so. Some large health systems are bolstering their physical location services with telehealth efforts to improve emergency care access, target chronic diseases in certain complex patient populations and provide new services to a broader range of patients.