Telemedicine plays a vital part in the health care industry as it builds a virtual bridge between providers and patients. More patients can receive medical services with this integration. Telemedicine is helpful and convenient for both providers and patients. For patients, it saves time to drive to clinics/hospitals & for providers, it saves time, and can see more patients in a day, and it’s also helpful for rural areas.
The significance of telemedicine is increasing day by day because of its ability to reduce healthcare costs, patient access to healthcare services, and improve the quality of patient care. People have found telemedicine technology easy to use and are satisfied with the services provided. Technologies such as the Internet, email, and video conferencing allow patients and consumers to access a broad range of healthcare services and information from their homes and communicate more efficiently with healthcare professionals. There will be even more benefits as the advancement of telemedicine continues.
Video conferencing technology has been available for some years now, but the covid-19 had acted as a catalyst in this telehealth business. In 2019 the telehealth claim volume was only 6.6M across US whereas in the year 2020 the claim volume increased to 160M. In 2021 is expected to be 130M but we are yet to understand the new normal in the Telehealth encounter.
Since the time of the pandemic, we also have seen people approaching telemedicine in our expEDIum system. The insurance company had allowed payment for telehealth encounters from March 2020. Since then, we saw in 2020 that there were about 38K claims related to telemedicine. It has increased to 46K in the first 9 months of 2021, and it’s forecasted to increase 1.6 times from the previous years and is expected to increase rapidly in the upcoming years.