Industry Insight

Survey Reveals Strong Demand for Telehealth
Despite Access and Cost Confusion

A joint survey of active health care users conducted by the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) and WEGO Health shows that consumers are interested in using telehealth as a replacement or complement to in-person care, citing convenience as the top motivator. Confusion persists, however, largely on whether their health provider offers telehealth options or if telehealth is covered by their insurer.

These results were released recently at the ATA’s Fall Forum event in New Orleans in a panel discussion with WEGO Health. Survey respondents were polled on their use of video-conferencing to interact with their health care provider. Of the 429 respondents, 22% had used video conferencing to meet with a provider, with the majority interacting with their provider while at home. Among these users, telehealth was requested by the patients as much as it was suggested with 50% of users having asked their provider for a video appointment and 50% reporting that their provider had offered telehealth as an appointment option.

Of the 78% of respondents who had not used telehealth in the last year, a majority reported that they thought telehealth would be more convenient, even though their provider did not offer virtual appointments. This demographic reported that ease of scheduling, reduced travel, and increased access to care for immobile patients would motivate them to choose virtual visits over in-person care.

“Clearly consumers are not only becoming aware of telemedicine but starting to demand access to it,” says Jonathan D. Linkous, CEO of the American Telemedicine Association. “It is becoming a part of the standard of care that should be made available throughout the country.”

Overwhelmingly, survey respondents demonstrated that the quality of telehealth over traditional care was not an issue when considering care. Patients who reported having used telehealth in the past year did so an average of one to four times.

— Source: American Telemedicine Association

M*Modal Names Chief Medical Informatics Officer

M*Modal, a provider of clinical documentation and speech understanding solutions, recently announced the appointment of Gilan El Saadawi, MD, PhD, MS, to chief medical informatics officer.

In collaboration with leading health care provider organizations, El Saadawi works closely with M*Modal’s team of natural language understanding (NLU) engineers, physician and nurse informaticists, clinical documentation improvement and coding professionals, platform architects, and application designers, to develop applications that bring clinical knowledge and insights in real-time to caregivers as they are documenting patient encounters.

“M*Modal’s unique speech and language understanding technology offers innovative solutions to close the loop in clinical documentation by understanding both structured and unstructured information,” El Saadawi says. “We are at a unique spot in this industry. We are assisting over 200,000 physicians day to day in documenting patient care with the M*Modal Fluency platform—with computer-assisted physician documentation live in several hundred sites. We have the opportunity to offer real informatics solutions from a physician’s perspective, to optimize clinician’s workflow and patient care,” she says.

Since joining M*Modal, El Saadawi’s mission has been to move natural language processing (NLP) and clinical informatics out of the realm of academia and into pragmatic practice for actual health care users. Today, more than 100 million patient encounters are documented using M*Modal’s Fluency and are all automatically interpreted and analyzed for opportunities to ensure the highest quality of documentation and patient care.

“With her guidance, M*Modal has transformed traditional NLP, which is typically used for retrospective analysis of data for research and reporting, into a NLU technology that scales broadly across a number of applications,” says Detlef Koll, M*Modal chief technology officer. “Gilan’s experience as a practicing pathologist combined with a comprehensive background in research and academia, clinical ontologies, and clinical inference make her uniquely qualified to bring technology into the everyday realities of healthcare practice,” Koll says.

El Saadawi’s background includes an MD and PhD in Pathology from Ain Shams University in Egypt, as well as a master’s degree in medical informatics from the University of Pittsburgh. Her time spent as managing consultant for the College of American Pathologists, in addition to her role as an assistant professor and director of medical vocabulary services at the University of Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, firmly established her credibility with the academic and scientific community.

— Source: M*Modal