Telehealth has taken more hits lately than a piñata at a birthday party.
In April, UnitedHealth Group announced it was shutting down its Optum Virtual Care program. Days later, Walmart announced it would shutter both Walmart Health and Walmart Health Virtual Care.
And in July, Teladoc posted a net loss of $838 million in Q2. The drop was largely driven by an impairment charge of ~$800 million for BetterHelp, the virtual mental health platform it acquired in 2015, Fierce Healthcare reported. Executives attributed the decline to increased customer acquisition costs, among other factors.
But while telehealth might currently be down, it’s not out. There are still plenty of industry experts that believe in its value and usefulness to patients.
“Telehealth is definitely here to stay,” Kyle Zebley, SVP of public policy for the American Telemedicine Association, said. “I don’t think there’s any interest in yanking the US healthcare system back toward the pre-pandemic normalcy in terms of having very limited access to telehealth and virtual care services.”
Rewinding: Telehealth use skyrocketed during the pandemic when it was difficult to get in-person care. Bolstered by flexibilities like Medicare coverage for telehealth visits, the percentage of physicians who used telemedicine increased from 15.4% in 2019 to 86.5% in 2021, the National Center for Health Statistics found.
But since 2021, telehealth use has largely been on the decline. Healthcare analytics group Trilliant Health found that quarterly telehealth visits have fallen from their peak of more than 60 million in 2020 to less than 30 million in Q3 2023, suggesting that, with the exception of behavioral health, consumers don’t feel like telehealth is replicating an in-person experience, according to a June analysis
Zebley said recent financial struggles and pivots in the telehealth industry are more reflective of the current economy and restructuring than of telehealth’s longevity. “If we believe, as we do, that telehealth is healthcare, [it’s] not going to be immune from fluctuations and changes in the market,” Zebley said.
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Looking forward. Another fluctuation may come from pandemic-era rules that expanded telehealth access for Medicare patients. They are set to expire at year’s end, though Congress is likely to extend them, Politico reported.
Some, like Trilliant Health’s chief research officer, Sanjula Jain, are doubtful these flexibilities should continue. In a June update, Jane said there are “limited” cases where telehealth is a good substitute for in-person care, but “numerous” cases where it leads to “excess spending through inappropriate utilization.”
Jain also called the current telehealth market “unsustainable,” recommending that health systems learn to use telehealth to “complement” in-person care instead of replacing it.
And it’s true that telehealth is best done in tandem with in-person offerings, said Derek Streat, co-founder and CEO of DexCare, a care orchestration platform that uses data intelligence to optimize workforce capacity and match patients to the best provider for them.
One example might be the one-stop-shop SmileDirectClub, a now-bankrupt 2014 startup that shipped clear dental aligners directly to consumers without requiring an in-person dentist or orthodontist visit, to the ire of groups like the American Dental Association, which argued aligning could not be safely done without regular in-person checkups for damage to gums, bones, and teeth.
“If you’re only kind of doing one piece of the puzzle…care doesn’t really work that way,” Streat said. “You can’t be single-threaded because it’s not going to be able to help me, as a patient, deal with my care journey.”