Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/759111
37 CIO / HEALTH IT The Future of Telehealth: 4 Questions With Teladoc's Dr. Alan Roga By Erin Dietsche A lan Roga, MD, has a jam-packed resume. Trained as an emergency medicine physician, he's a fellow of the American College of Emergency Medicine and has been recognized multiple times as Phoenix Magazine's "Top Doctor" in emergency med- icine. In 2009, he founded StatDoctors, which was acquired by Teladoc in June 2015. With the acquisition, Dr. Roga serves as president of Teladoc's provider market division. Purchase, N.Y.-based Teladoc, which has been operational since 2005 and went public in July 2015, is the first provider of telehealth medical visits in the U.S. Servicing employers, insurance carriers and hospital systems, with 15.4 million members and more than 1.6 million visits since its inception, the company works to tackle three of the largest issues in healthcare: access, cost and quality. Teladoc has also devel- oped a four-step readiness assessment tool — the framework of which involves organizational, use cases, operational and solution set steps — to help hospitals and health systems find the best way of creating a telehealth roadmap. Dr. Roga, a thought leader, has also written about the future of tele- health and spoken about the best way to integrate a telehealth strate- gy. Here, Dr. Roga discussed Teladoc's readiness assessment, what sets Teladoc apart and where telehealth is headed. Question: What sets Teladoc apart from other telehealth providers? Dr. Alan Roga: We are the only one of the modern day tele- health companies that are public. With this comes extensive transparency on our company operations, metrics and third-par- ty validation on the value we provide to clients. Additionally, we currently have about 70 percent of the market share, and we've done significantly more visits than anyone else in the telehealth space. There are three ways in which Teladoc sets itself apart. First, when it comes to the provider space, Teladoc is only one of the major vendors that has a dedicated business unit that focus- es exclusively on hospitals and health systems. Although we're a larger telehealth company, the fact that we have a dedicated team allows us to have specific subject matter expertise in the provider market, serve our clients better and be nimble in technology and operational development. e second big bucket is regarding our ability to support our clients in three main areas: marketing, operations and provider network. We pro- vide unmatched marketing and consumer engagement resources and pretty much every piece of material a client can request. We are the only one of the telehealth companies that has completely insourced their consumer touch points from end to end. is is accomplished through our 75,000-square-foot operations center in Dallas. Every time a pa- tient interacts with us through our operations center, it's with a Teladoc employee. is allows us to provide superior care and better oversight of our quality programs. Finally, we have over 3,100 providers in our network, to support our hospitals' programs to the degree they request. The third major area is our technology, which is not only cloud- based but also cloud-architected technology. e result is greater reliability and configurability of the client's instance, providing confi- dence in the platform and decreased overall fees. Q: Why did you develop your readiness assessment tool and what do you see as the primary benefits of the read- iness assessment as opposed to other methods of devel- oping a telehealth strategy? AR: e telehealth market began in the employer space. It migrated to insurance and is now in the hospital space because the financial risk has been shied. Seventy percent of large employers have or will be implementing telehealth by 2017. Hospitals realize they're going to be doing telehealth, but what I find is that most of them question how to start. An easy trap is to only look at the technology aspect. But technology is just the tip of the iceberg. Ninety percent of a successful telehealth strategy involves people, pro- cesses and operational support. Telehealth is a delivery system. Hos- pital partners would oen come to us with a use case. ey were ei- ther responding to a competitive force in the marketplace or they were increasing their financial risk exposure, but they hadn't necessarily thought through the strategy of a telehealth program. We had to develop a tool to help providers know where to start. e number one mistake I see among providers is not aligning their telehealth strategy with their organizational goals. e number two mistake I see is that organizations underestimate their operational support needs. ey'll quickly want to change their brick and mortar delivery to telehealth. Our tool takes organizations through a plan- ning process. It starts with organizational alignment, then evaluates use cases, addresses operational needs, and ends up with solution sets. We then develop a multi-year plan for the hospital. Our readiness assessment helps providers align their telehealth initia- tives with their organizational goals. What we find at the end of the day is that we have happier clients with more effective programs and yielding better results. Q: What is one word or phrase you think we should use more in healthcare? AR: Without question, value. I believe that not only for telehealth but also for healthcare in general, we haven't necessarily thought of the programs and procedures from a value decision-making matrix. ere has to be value creation in everything. "The number one mistake I see among providers is not aligning their telehealth strategy with their organizational goals."