Healthcare Execs: Telemedicine A High Priority

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

REACH Health's inaugural telemedicine survey asked healthcare professionals their priorities, objectives, and challenges and found executives want telemedicine in 2015.

Telemedicine is a high priority for healthcare executives, according to a survey released by REACH Health. The first annual telemedicine survey discovered that 60 percent of respondents listed telemedicine as a high priority in 2015. Fierce Health IT reports 223 health professionals answered the survey.

“Our first annual telemedicine industry survey exposed a variety of interesting findings, some anticipated and many that are surprising,” said Steve McGraw, President and CEO of REACH Health in a press release. “One interesting result that emerged: the degree of focus of the telemedicine program manager had a stronger correlation with success than did executive support or adequacy of funding.”

The largest challenge to telemedicine programs was cost – reimbursement was a major issue and providers expressed a concern that there was not enough funding for such programs. The goals of telemedicine programs were most commonly not related to “financial motives, but rather patient outcomes, access to specialists and improving leverage of limited physician resources,” says the report.

“Surprisingly, at the top of the list of ROI drivers is ‘Improved Reputation,’ which is generally regarded as a soft driver for financial performance compared to hard drivers such as reimbursement,” said McGraw. “The underlying details of these and other findings documented in the report will help providers benchmark their programs with those of their peers to identify opportunities for growth and improvement.”

The report concluded, “Analysis of this input exposed numerous findings such as the challenges that have been most widely mitigated and those that continue to pose obstacles, as well as identifying telemedicine program attributes that are most highly correlated to success.”