A growing number of Americans are visiting the doctor without ever leaving their home. The use of telehealth services skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic and experts say that came with benefits and challenges.
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn is a health economist and advisor, as well as the author of a health blog. Sarasohn-Kahn says calling the pandemic an “accelerant” on the use of telehealth would be an understatement.
“Telehealth became a norm,” she said. “And so you saw hockey stick growth and uptake amongst all health citizens in the US, across age groups, and then, particularly, for the first time many older adults, say, members of AARP and older, experienced using FaceTime or Zoom or other platforms.”
Sarasohn-Kahn calls the phenomenon a “little gift” that came out of the pandemic. There are other benefits to telehealth that continue beyond the pandemic, particularly its availability to underserved populations.
Now, anyone with access to the internet has access to a wide array of health services, including mental health treatment. Telehealth even has applications in culture-specific scenarios.
“Sometimes females in certain subcultures can’t see a male doctor hands-on in an exam room,” Sarasohn-Kahn said. “So, telehealth could be a really good approach to addressing that kind of situation.”
Of course, Sarasohn-Kahn and other experts acknowledge that progress forward in technology also typically brings challenges and issues to solve. One challenge facing telehealth is getting reliable internet access to the underserved communities that would benefit from its use in the first place.
Another is working to guarantee the privacy of medical information shared and quality of treatment delivered online. Medical bias is a documented concern in in-person care, some experts are worried that the growing use of AI and technology in healthcare could codify and perpetuate these biases.
“Ethics and privacy by design has been an issue since the beginning of the internet and healthcare, working with WebMD and Google, Dr. Google, which everybody now uses to self diagnose and search conditions,” Sarasohn-Kahn said. “So no, this is being worked on all the time right now and we’re seeing evidence-based growth that these are issues that are being attended to. So, I’m encouraged, definitely, by the real time growth of attention to these areas.”
The challenges for telehealth don’t end in the research, they extend to the halls of Congress. A pandemic-era bill that expires at the end of the year loosened restrictions on what could be accomplished via telehealth, allowing for prescriptions, working across state borders despite licensing restrictions and instituting parity of payments rules.
“So we're hopeful that when Congress returns after the November elections, there will be signing for at least the telehealth extensions under what's called the telehealth Modernization Act of 2024,” Sarasohn-Kahn said. “I'll remain hopeful, not naive, but hopeful, that this will get signed so that we enter 2025, with robust regulations behind us to support the ongoing adoption and use of telehealth.”
However, Sarasohn-Kahn says congress won’t be the only place considering healthcare issues later this year. Polling, she says, shows an increased amount of health policy consideration from American voters.
“[It’s] not just about women’s health, but about affordability of care, affordability of drug costs, that is less, lower drug costs for all, not just for Medicare enrollees, health access and mental health,” Sarasohn-Kahn said. “While the opioid crisis is still on many Americans’ minds, mental health in general, for younger people, older people, and now we have new data from the American Psychological Association that parents of children are now dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress.”
Sarasohn-Kahn is speaking at the first OSF OnCall Digital Health Symposium at the Jump Simulation Center in Peoria on Oct. 16. You can find more information and registration for that event here.
