Telehealth has become one of the most popular ways for patients to access behavioral health care in the country, but it could lead to a more fragmented patient journey.
That’s according to new research by Trilliant Health, which used its national payer claims database to find the percentage of patients who used virtual health and then had an in-person follow-up visit for the same health concern within a week.
The latest report found that between Q1 2021 and Q3 2022, only 11.1% of telehealth visits nationally resulted in an in-person follow-up visit for the same clinical reason within a week.
“For now, every health economy stakeholder must realize that these data findings are just one dimension of the magnitude of friction and fragmentation that now exists,” Sanjula Jain, senior vice president of market strategy and chief research officer at Trilliant Health, wrote in the report. “While the positives of “consumerism” may be realized to an extent, there are also significant implications for both how other stakeholders adapt to a more distributed care model and how patient healthcare behaviors will change over a longer period.”
Brentwood, Tennessee-based Trilliant Health is a market research and predictive analytics firm that helps companies build an evidence-based strategy for health care.
Still, behavioral health visits were the number one reason for duplicate visits.
The top behavioral health reasons patients had a follow-up in-person visit were reactions to severe stress, major depressive disorder, developmental disorders, anxiety, opioid-related disorders, bipolar disorder, ADHD, alcohol-related disorder, schizoaffective disorder and mood disorders.
“While telehealth is often used to treat low-acuity conditions (e.g., bacterial infections, allergies), it is increasingly utilized for treatment of chronic conditions (e.g., diabetes, high cholesterol and major depression), which typically require long-term care management,” Jain wrote. “[Direct-to-consumer] telehealth providers like Amazon Clinic are limited in their ability to maintain an established relationship with the patient or provide any type of ongoing monitoring or treatment that does not result in a prescription.”
Despite the potential for telehealth to fragment healthcare delivery systems, it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon. In June, LexisNexis came out with new research that found virtual visits for mental health grew 84 times higher in 2022 compared with 2019.
Virtual behavioral health companies also got a significant funding boost after the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Bend Health, Brightline, Talkiatry, Lyra and Quartet have all completed successful funding rounds in the last two years.
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