Prioritizing Technological Innovation for the Future of Virtual Care

Raj Toleti, chief executive officer and founder of Andor Health, discusses the future of telehealth with a focus on how technological advances will encourage patient follow-up, ease administrative burden for providers, and keep patient data secure.

We know that the pandemic sped up the process for telehealth integration. Do you think it is here to stay? Will more health systems continue to engage patients via telehealth?

Absolutely, yes. We have seen that the trend extends beyond health care into various industries and the change is permanent. Virtual team collaboration or virtual collaboration between various consumers and service providers is here to stay.

In the health care industry specifically, data indicates that between to 35% and 40% of patients still prefer to conduct their visits virtually if they are able to.

Can you talk about how telehealth fits into overall care models?

If you look at fee-for-service and fee-for-value, the goal in health care is to be able to provide a better outcome with the most efficient cost for the consumer, who is the patient.

I come from a family of 33 doctors—my parents, my grandparents, and my mother’s eight siblings. I grew up around health care delivery systems. And one of the inhibiting factors for patients to receive service is honestly that most patients are lazy about follow-ups for their annual physicals—creating gaps in care—whether it is blood tests to manage their diabetes or whatever might be the episode or the service that they would need to proactively maintain their health.

Before, patients would have to physically visit the provider because providers were not open to conducting virtual visits. The pandemic flipped that model on its head. The providers know that 25% to 30% of their business or their patients are going to be virtual. This is going to be a channel that they must keep open.

The virtual care channel is more efficient from a cost perspective, with the provider having the ability to stratify their patient populations through electronic triage much more efficiently, even before seeing the patients in person.

This channel is going to be more efficient for patients to be proactive, too. The patients themselves are able to close 40% more care gaps, per the data that we have, because of their proactiveness through virtual health. Fundamentally, we believe that virtual health and visits are going to be a significant catalyst in the ability to transition from fee-for-service to fee-for-value.

How can health systems make sure patient privacy is still a priority with this increase in technology use?

First and foremost, when patients are coming on a virtual health visit, you have video, audio, and text—an omnichannel engagement with the patient. From a security standpoint, the providers and the health systems can and should be instrumenting a multifactor authentication for this modality of virtual visits—meaning if I am the physician and you are the patient, obviously, I'm having a face-to-face discussion with you and I'm able to actually confirm who you are.

If the technology, like we provide, is implemented in a Zoom or Microsoft Teams session, I can make the video window a canvas for me to bring up your medical record and show it to you in real-time, where the canvas itself is highly protected. You, as the patient, are only seeing what you need to see as a patient, and I am only showing you what you need to see.

This will start mitigating a lot of risks around security in this modality, as opposed to just going through a patient portal, which we know have been compromised historically with a variety of data breaches. We believe that with the right instrumentation and implementation of a sustainable virtual health strategy, you are able to further secure your health data content as a provider, a payer, or a life sciences company.

Overall, is there anything else you would like to add to this conversation?

One of the things that we all must be mindful of in this space is telehealth has evolved historically as point capability, technologies that do telehealth visits are very focused on that capability.

There might be a technology that would help providers do a virtual rounding within a hospital, where the physician doesn't have to go to the room, or they can click on a patient list and join the room from their home or wherever. That is a different technology provider. You have yet another technology provider that can stitch together a Teams, a Slack, or some secure clinical communications platform. You have another technology provider that might do remote patient monitoring virtually, like connecting devices to the patient at home, enabling the provider to monitor the patient remotely.

What that makes the providers do is log into four or five systems, resulting in a disjointed experience for the provider and the patient. We need a single platform where the provider and the patient can connect on these various use cases, whether it is a telehealth visit, a rounding visit, a remote patient monitoring visit, or if I have to text my coworkers on the same platform.

We believe that will be more sustainable. It will delight the provider care teams and create an ideal patient experience for the consumer.

About Raj Toleti

Raj Toleti is the chief executive officer and founder of Andor Health, which provides a single integrated platform for providers, payers, and life sciences companies for virtual health in general. Andor Health is Mr Toleti’s fourth technology startup in the health information technology space. His previous companies also involved technological innovation, including a patient engagement platform. Andor Health seeks to empower consumers to conduct self-service, such as paying bills or conducting self-check-ins online. Currently, Andor Health’s mission is to create that same level of self-service ability around an electronic medical record technology to enhance virtual health.