A Look at Telehealth in the Pandemic: COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition

This article is part of our Good Resources series, where we review people or teams that are producing helpful content about telehealth or healthcare trends. Today we are focusing on the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition. 

Introducing the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, with broad implications for healthcare in general and telehealth specifically, there are a few excellent aggregations of information specifically for healthcare providers and those of us looking to better understand the dynamics of what is happening. The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition is a group of private sector healthcare systems that have been aggregating their pandemic data in order to help each other and the rest of the industry develop best practices for this pandemic and any future health emergencies. 

Their Impact Report gives an overview of the great work that they have been doing and the many many organizations that have contributed.

Resource Highlights

The Coalition has a few really great reports that are worth diving into in more detail. We will touch on two here, but you should really spend some time digging through their Resource Library as it is really well organized and a great example of what you can do with thoughtfully aggregated data and applied expertise.

Decision Dashboard

The Decision Support Dashboard is designed for a policy or decision maker to compare relevant pandemic data between locations at the state or county level and view relevant guidance from numerous expert sources with suggested policy actions.

The recommendations are from 2020 sources and don’t appear to have kept up with the most recent guidance, but the tracking and scorecard are still very useful and there is a lot of value in comparing location trends in this manner. 

Telehealth Impact Study

The Telehealth Impact Study is the result of three in-depth analyses on Claims Data, a Physician Survey, and a Patient Survey. Covering all three of these facets of the pandemic response gives a really full picture of how the healthcare system reacted to the restrictions of 2020. 

The whole report is worth a read, especially because the team does a really wonderful job allowing you to drill into the data from multiple perspectives. 

A handful of points really jump out that are worth highlighting here. First, all specialities saw a dramatic increase in telehealth claims, but behavioral and mental health saw an increase 5x higher than the next highest complaint type.

Second, post-pandemic the types of care that physicians are most excited to continue using telehealth for are almost all of a recurring type. This mirrors data from other sources that highlights the much lower no-show rate when a follow-up appointment is conducted via telehealth instead of in person. 

Third and perhaps the most telling statistic from the whole report, comes from the Patient survey. A whopping 54.5% of patients surveyed said that if they couldn’t have gone to a telehealth appointment they would have delayed care. This has a huge impact on patient outcomes and management of chronic conditions. The speedy and effective shift to telehealth as part of the pandemic response has clearly had a large positive impact. 

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