Diagnosing the Revenue Potential of Telemedicine

There’s an intriguing dance taking place right now among patients, physicians, telemedicine technology vendors, regulators and healthcare finance leaders. I’m not sure who will take the lead eventually, but it will be fascinating to watch.

Patients like the convenience of telemedicine. Doctors don’t like patients bugging them by phone, email or text. Telemedicine technology vendors salivate over the market potential of asynchronous physician-patient communication. Regulators want to proceed cautiously as they try to balance online visits with in-person visits. And healthcare finance leaders are calculating the profit possibilities from a more digital healthcare delivery system.

That’s my reading-between-the-lines takeaway from a short research letter published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Five researchers from the University of California at San Francisco, Trilliant Health and Harvard looked at e-visit billing trends from January 2020 through September 2022. The e-visit study pool was claims paid by traditional Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans and commercial payers for electronic visits initiated by existing (versus new) patients with their doctors of three different time durations: 5 to 10 minutes; 11 to 20 minutes; or 21 minutes or longer.

Here’s what the researchers found:

• 44.8% of the e-visits were 5-10 minutes long followed by 11-20 minutes (40.4%) and 21 minutes or longer (14.8%).
• The most common medical conditions for the three e-visit durations, from shortest to longest respectively, were sinus infection, upper respiratory infection and high blood pressure.
• The average number of e-visit claims per month was 100,541 in 2022 compared with 77,164 in 2021 and 103,127 in 2020.
• The number of unique providers who billed for at least 50 e-visits per quarter rose to 471 in the third quarter of 2022 from 337 in the third quarter of 2021, a nearly 40% increase.

“Billing for e-visits peaked at the onset of the pandemic, fell, and then rebounded slowly, whereas the number of organizations billing e-visits has increased since mid-2021,” the researchers said. “Together these findings suggest health system interest in e-visit billing has evolved from a short-term pandemic necessity to a potential long-term source of revenue.”

One man’s convenience is another man’s profit margin.

Thanks for reading.