Coviu CEO and Co-Founder, Dr Silvia Pfeiffer went live on LinkedIn to discuss Industry Trends in Digital Healthcare.
If you made it to the live on Thursday 22 July, we hope you enjoyed Dr Silvia Pfeiffer's chat on Industry Trends in Digital Healthcare. Despite a few technical hiccups at the beginning, Dr Pfeiffer gave a great overview of where telehealth is currently and where it can go in the future.
In case you missed it, you can access the full recording below:
To recap a little, Dr Pfeiffer discusses how far video telehealth has come since the COVID-19 pandemic and personally believes that a new era has begun in health care. "We have watched the signs for many years but the pandemic has put a firm stake in the ground for a digitally converted health care industry", she says.
Todays challenges in health care are different, we are now dealing with more chronically ill patients than acute illnesses and despite talking about the need to adapt, we are still working the same way we did 50 years ago. With 40% of our health care spending going to hospitals, 33% to primary health care, doctor visits are still the main reimbursement means of receiving care and 17% of Australian health care spending now is mainly by individuals out of pocket and remains the fastest growing expenditure in health care.
Our health care system is not able to scale its current situation to the needs of patients in our ever changing health care landscape. Hospitals cannot deal with 50% more patients in their emergency departments as there are not enough health care practitioners to provide health care at the rate needed. Dr Pfeiffer see's the future as a combined system of technology and health expertise, where the health practitioner decides on the right pathways with the individual and the individual is made responsible for executing the technology.
Telehealth is the first step in our digital transformation worldwide. In 2020, Coviu delivered over 3 million telehealth consultations. The global pandemic definitely spurred on the massive increase in telehealth with Coviu specifically gaining a 4000% increase in telehealth sessions since December 2019. However, the pandemic was just a catalyst for telehealth sessions. Some health care professionals have adopted telehealth solutions to improve patient care, remote patient monitoring and accessibility.
"The uptake of telehealth is rising which is no surprise because patients love telehealth", Dr Pfeiffer says, "They don't see it as a replacement of in person consultations but just a different option to reach out to their clinician". You can also view our consumer research study here which has some great statistics about the want from consumers around the adoption of telehealth.
"Telehealth is just the beginning of the digital transformation that we are seeing with video and phone telehealth being the first step", Dr Pfeiffer says.
This includes text chat, SMS messages with patients, asynchronous telehealth where patients might send a photo or document and want an email or message analysis back (popular in dermatology today) but one big change is Remote Patient Monitoring.
This is a wearable device in combination with your phone capturing data and transmitting it to dashboards for your clinicians to watch and react to. It is a new type of health care that we have not seen before. These mobile applications will give you advice and alerts to improve your health. It is a new approach that we hope to see here soon.
Dr Pfeiffer foresees a transition path that will making use of our limited health care resources, improve patient outcomes, patient and clinician experiences and contribute to a happier and healthier life overall.
For any burning questions please feel free to comment on the LinkedIn video, we would love to keep the conversation going. Plus, stay tuned for our next LinkedIn Live where we will continue to discuss telehealth trends in healthcare.
Dr Silvia Pfeiffer is Coviu’s CEO and Co-Founder, driving the global mission of Coviu. With over 18 years experience building new Web video solutions, Silvia has worked at leading corporations including Google, Mozilla, NICTA and CSIRO. Silvia spun Coviu out of the CSIRO as her second business after founding a Web video analytics company. Silvia has a double degree in computer science and business management and manages sales, marketing, investments, and product strategy in Coviu.
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