1 Billion Telehealth Appointments in 2020?

Prior to 2020, had you ever had an online appointment with your doctor? Maybe a phone follow up? The norm was to get in your car, race to find a parking spot, then wait in a drab waiting room, all before rushing through the 10 minutes you had to speak with your physician. Then a pandemic forced us into virtual health visits instead. Now, from the comfort of our home, we can wait online for our appointment and avoid the drive, hassle and contact of a medical office (if our condition allows).

Telehealth (ie. Virtual visits) provides; "a low-risk way for healthcare workers to care for patients with other conditions who were leery of coming into a healthcare facility because of the virus." [1] Pre-pandemic, in the USA there were only 36 million visits projected for 2020. Wow how things have changed!

In British Columbia the Doctors of BC report that telehealth visits shot up from 22k a month in February to over 1.4million in the month of April. It is a bit mind boggling to see the growth of Telehealth throughout the pandemic, and while it is not surprising (given the circumstances) it is impressive to see a historically slow moving industry adapt so quickly.

“There were three barriers that impacted the lack of adoption, or the slowness of adoption, before the pandemic hit. We saw cost ... availability ... and then we also saw relationships playing a factor,” according to Forrester analyst Arielle Trzcinski. “If a patient was able to see their existing provider, they were much more likely to use the service.” [3]

With 1 billion telehealth visits on the horizon for 2020, and a similar outlook for 2021, it's clear to see that virtual doctors visits are here to stay. Yet, we are still in the early days of this ehealth evolution. Providers are adapting and creating, patients and physicians are adjusting and learning and patiently we are all figuring it out.

"Despite signs of growing adoption, Canada is still in the early days of telehealth services, according to a recent report by Infor Financial Inc. principal Kenrick Sylvestre. Canada's digital health space is vastly under-penetrated relative to other developed countries as doctors remain well behind in providing technology-driven offerings to patients, he said. [4]

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Given the growing need for both physicians and patients to have virtual visit options, Arya is excited to announce that we have developed and launched our own integrated Telehealth module! Bringing to market this new feature took a few months as we worked out the features, workflows and user profiles. This was no easy task given our remote working and web based interactions. We are proud to have brought this to our users so quickly, but it required a lot of heavy lifting.

ARYA Telehealth is fully integrated within our EMR. This saves you time from switching between software or duplicating information over to a third party telehealth option. At only $99 per month we are offering a superior product at a lower price than competition. And just like our EMR it is extremely intuitive and easy for patients, without needing to download any software. All patients need is an email address.

For those of you that have benefited from using our EMR software you know how easy it is to navigate. The same goes with our new telehealth module. Its speed, intuitive work flows, and clean layout are quickly learned with no training required.

If you are interested in finding out more about Arya EHR and our Telehealth feature please feel free to Contact Us. With 1+ Billion telehealth visits just this year, what's your virtual health solution?