We’ve mentioned it before, but telehealth utilization skyrocketed during the pandemic. Do you know how your physicians use telehealth? What key components of the telehealth platform do they find most useful? Where is the industry headed?
Doximity offers a simple, secure telehealth tool called Doximity Dialer, so we chatted with our product expert, Jake Konoske, to gain some insight.
What new Dialer features have surpassed your expectations?
Enhancements that have focused on quality of life for physicians. The call nudge feature (where physicians can nudge patients with a reminder to join their call) has seen the most success. It allows physicians to quickly move onto their next visit and stay on track with appointments. Often, if one visit goes over, it sets a physician’s entire day behind schedule.
Patient arrival notifications are also popular. Dialer allows physicians to start an appointment, leave to focus on another task, and get a message once a patient joins. We’ve found that 20% of visits start this way.
Wall charts are the last thing we’ve found that has been a great value add for physicians. Content-driven visits are often best accompanied by specialty images that clinicians can share, draw on, and annotate to explain conditions to patients.
What has surprised you in the telehealth world?
One thing that’s surprised me is the importance of profile photos. We’ve found that when a clinician has a picture shown on their landing page, there’s a 3-4% lift in a patient joining the visit.
We monitor visit trends by comparing the percent of patients who successfully join a call to the number of patients invited to a call per day (i.e., 90 out of 100 patients invited joined a call). There are relatively consistent patterns every week from Monday to Friday. We’ve found the best time to call a patient is mid-morning (around 11 AM local time) on Monday's and the worst time tends to be on the weekends. There's a gradual decline of 2-3% from Monday to Friday, so it seems the earlier in the week the appointment, the more likely the physician can reach the patient.
Where do you see telehealth going in the next couple of years?
It's safe to say that Telehealth is here to stay. We continue to see strong telehealth growth and adoption. In the last quarter alone, we added over 24,000 physicians to the enterprise version of Dialer and now serve over 30% of all U.S. doctors through Dialer Enterprise telehealth partnerships. We genuinely find that our telehealth technology helps make the day-to-day of a physician's workload more manageable. For example, it enables the ability to quickly convert regular calls to video, which is imperative if there is a concern or a condition where the physician needs to "see" the patient. And allowing patients an easy way to connect to the visit outside a patient portal adds to our visit success rate; often patients forget their portal login or password, causing delays or missed appointments. The flexibility and security of Dialer offers a variety of benefits when added to clinical workflows. We expect about 20% of visits to be conducted via telehealth in the future; even more, if the industry as a whole can help remove regulatory barriers and standardize reimbursement policies. But we'll save that topic for another day.