Some health care professionals say telemedicine is one of the positive remnants of the COVID-19 pandemic, and likely would not have flourished as fast without it.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Five years since the U.S. was first introduced to the ravages of COVID-19, many of the pandemic’s impacts still remain—for better or worse. However, telehealth’s prevalence is considered among the positives.
Health care professionals point to the pandemic as the main reason the technological adaptation flourished, becoming what is now considered a staple in medical services.
CDC data shows the pandemic directly caused a spike in telemedicine use, with around 15% of physicians using it in 2019—pre-pandemic. By 2021, nearly 87% had telehealth offerings.
Meghan Huffman, Novant Health’s Vice President of Digital Health, said she was on a plane to Morocco in 2020 when COVID-19 turned the world upside down and forced so many, including her team at the time, to innovate on how to provide care when many people could not or did not want to leave their homes.
“That plane turned around as soon as we landed,” Huffman said. “I got home, and we end up setting up a war room at the organization I was at—I wasn’t at Novant at the time—to understand… what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? And then, not even 24 hours later, someone in the war room got COVID.”
Turns out, she said, expanding telehealth was the way to go.
“I just remember it being a pretty crazy time, but at the same time, the health care community came together in a way I’ve never seen before,” Huffman said. “It was, ‘We’ve got to figure out solutions,’ and ‘We’ve got to do this for our patients and our providers.’ So, it was a pretty remarkable time, but it was stressful.”
It was a change of tone from pre-pandemic, when Huffman said she was essentially having to tout the technology’s benefits to health care providers.
“Before COVID hit, and where telehealth was at—I was doing a lot of selling,” Huffman said. “Convincing physicians and the health system about the benefits of telehealth, and at the time, it was really mostly focused on the hospital side.”
Now, it is considered a standard for so many.
“If it’s just a checkup, to see how things are going, it just makes more sense that I’m not wasting time getting into a car and trying to get through traffic and all of that,” Huffman said. “It’s this lifeline that patients can use to quickly be able to assess something .”
Perhaps to no surprise, artificial intelligence is likely the next frontier for remote care, Huffman said, as is reimagining how telehealth can be offered in more settings and for more services.
“What we found is patients do better in their house,” Huffman said. “They’re comfortable. They’re sleeping in their own bed, and so, what we’re seeing is the technology is meeting us in a way that we’re able to have tests that can be run from a portable perspective, if we have the right kind of folks—visiting nurses—at patients’ homes.”
Huffman also hopes it can be used to ease the burden of the nursing shortage.
“How can we create some digital or telehealth capabilities in our hospitals to take some of that pressure off of our boots on the ground staff, who are doing the hands-on work every day, and provide them with some sort of outlet or some sort of reprieve that can help with their day to day tasks?” Huffman said.
