Episode Details

Here's the biggest problem with a lot of telehealth endeavors: Someone decides that they need to be doing telehealth, for whatever reason. Maybe there's a pandemic, for example. And the basic plan is this: Install some technology, give everyone a username and password and a link for patients, check that box, and move on to the next thing.

My guest in this healthcare podcast, Liliana Petrova, has seen and talked about how, far too many times, the whole concept of telehealth is narrowed down to the exact moment where a patient and a doctor have a visit together. That's it … that transaction.

There's little effort, if any effort, made to integrate telehealth into the existing clinical workflow, into the existing patient/customer experience, into the core business, into anything longitudinal. Telehealth becomes a weird island of a service only used by intrepid clinicians willing to put in the time and effort required to deal with its vagaries and inconveniences. Only used also by patients who manage to find the telehealth link buried on some Web site somewhere and then figure out how to schedule their telehealth appointments within a scheduling system mostly unable to accommodate virtual visits without a party-sized amount of technical expertise and, probably, chutzpah.

There are consequences to this narrow and pretty slapdash thinking. One of them is that you have very few clinicians and patients willing to brave the organization's telehealth experience or lack thereof, so they don't use it. And then at some point the organization does a survey of how much telehealth is going on—and wow! Surprising news: Incredibly few are using telehealth. So, the conclusion is drawn that patients and/or clinicians don't want telehealth. What happens then? Further funding is withdrawn and/or the whole telehealth thing goes down on the chopping block.

It reminds me of a cartoon I saw the other day. It was a picture of a bar chart showing some survey results. One of the bars in the bar chart was huge, and then the other one was, like, zero. It was a poll. There were two questions in the poll. Here are the two questions: Do you respond to polls, or don't you respond to polls? And as per the poll results in the bar chart in the cartoon, turns out, 100% of people respond to polls.

Funny but, at the same time, true. Many organizations don't really think through the provenance of the "data" they're using to make really important decisions, and when it comes to telehealth, there's a lot of dirty data flying around.

This dirty data, though, might be one explanation for the delta between the conclusions of all those studies showing that three out of four patients, always a comfortable majority of patients, intend to use telehealth versus the many health systems and/or provider organizations or even some doctors themselves sniffing and turning up their noses and saying that none of their patients are interested in using telehealth because no one is using telehealth in their office.

Right. The only thing that's being anecdotally determined by these anecdotal conclusions is that patients don't like and/or even know about that office's telehealth solution. It says nothing of the larger trend.

When organizations make decisions to not do telehealth well or at all because they didn't do it well and no one could figure out how to use it, then the value that telehealth could bring to both patients and clinicians is forfeit. Sad. Also, considering the X on the backs of some specialists and health systems in general these days, this could have longer-term consequences. Some good clinicians could find themselves way behind the curve after making what amounts to a very poor strategic decision.

In this episode, I am speaking with Liliana Petrova, CEO of The Petrova Experience. Liliana is an expert on customer and patient experience. She hails originally from the aviation industry, where she was d