Covid, one year on: Americans continue to embrace telehealth

With vaccines being administered all over the world, Sykes mused upon whether this could mean a decline in socially distanced telehealth services too, and so set out to find out whether patients would still want access to virtual doctor visits over a year since telehealth was widely distributed in response to the global pandemic.

Key findings included in the report reveal that, now, 80 per cent of respondents believe that people can receive quality care through telehealth, whereas, pre-pandemic, 66 per cent people were doubtful of the quality of care someone could receive in a virtual doctor appointment.

Furthermore, 88 per cent of respondents who tried telehealth during the pandemic want to continue using telehealth even after the pandemic, and 52 per cent of respondents who tried telehealth during the pandemic reported seeing their physician more often now that they have the option for telehealth appointments – if that isn’t a win for remote healthcare, what is.

Decreasing costs and improving patient experience

And, in terms of cost containment for patients, 31 per cent of respondents who tried telehealth during the pandemic say that it has decreased their healthcare expenses, a factor that is immeasurably important to those privy to the expensive US healthcare system.

What’s more, positive experience of telehealth has improved people’s perceptions of remote healthcare – so much so that 74 per cent of Syke’s respondents would be open to sharing their digital fitness tracker or smart medical device health data with their physician during a telehealth appointment. We’ve recently touched upon the integral role that health data will play in helping personalise the insurance industry, so this final statistic is an important one indeed.

To read more findings uncovered by Syke, including the hurdles that need to be overcome for widespread telehealth rollout, take a look at the company’s report online here.