How Payers Can Calm Member Fears, Push Virtual Care Adoption

As the healthcare landscape is becoming more digitized, payers can take steps to prevent members from falling back into old, non-digital forms of care, a recent Accenture report highlighted.

The report followed up on Accenture’s previous 2020 Digital Health Consumer Survey, which had discovered that patient engagement technology adoption dipped for the first time.

That survey revealed that mobile phone and tablet app usage dropped from 48 percent of consumers using them in 2018 down to 35 percent using these devices and wearable technology dropped around 15 percentage points.

The new report examined whether this downward trend had changed in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The global pandemic greatly accelerated the adoption of digital healthcare—but will it persist?” the more recent Accenture report asked. “The Accenture 2020 digital health consumer research showed the rapid rise of digital health had stalled. Now, COVID-19 may serve to resume the growth.”

Early data certainly points toward a major surge in virtual and digital healthcare usage, Accenture noted. Even virtual wellness programs have experienced a leap in member engagement.

Payers have commonly cited various reasons to incentivize virtual care. For example, digital and virtual care, specifically telehealth solutions, could play a significant role in lowering member healthcare spending and, by extension, payer spending.

However, experts are careful to qualify that virtual and digital healthcare will never be able to wholesale replace all in-person services.

As payers ride the current wave of digital healthcare adoption, Accenture noted a couple of challenges that could dim member enthusiasm and force the payer industry to return to previous digital healthcare trends.

Maintaining a quality of care level that meets member expectations via digital and virtual healthcare could be a challenge after the pandemic. While members were willing to lower their standards during the beginning of the crisis, they may return to harboring high expectations when they return to more regular patterns of care.

Members were more heavily influenced by negative digital healthcare experiences than positive ones. Half of the respondents said that poor digital care gave them a bad perception of the provider experience overall.

Payers may find their digital healthcare uptake hitting a brick wall when it comes to patient populations that are lower income. Whereas 31 percent of respondents with incomes over $100,000 said that they had engaged with their providers through virtual care, 17 percent of those with incomes of less than $50,000 could say the same.

Members may also be concerned about privacy and security with virtual healthcare.

This is a concern even in the present, as headlines revealing FBI investigations into Zoom hijacking and remote patient monitoring vulnerabilities do not bolster member confidence. Overall, only 19 percent of respondents said that they think digital healthcare data is being used responsibly.

Three-quarters of the respondents trusted their health plans to keep their healthcare data secure. This is a majority percentage, but respondents still placed more trust in their hospitals (84 percent), providers (83 percent), pharmacies (82 percent), and laboratories (80 percent).

To mitigate these fears, payers can build trust by instituting strong privacy and security protections. They can also be clear with members about how they will be using the data. Lastly, they can prove that member data security is a company priority and build trust with members by ensuring that there is an individual at the executive level to oversee data privacy.

At the same time, despite their concerns regarding security, members genuinely seem interested in virtual care, even outside of the pandemic’s pressures. Primarily, they want these tools for basic care needs.

For example, over six in ten of the survey participants would use virtual care for health and wellness advisories (62 percent). Nearly 60 percent would also be open to using virtual care for remote monitoring of their condition (57 percent). At varying levels between 44 percent and 52 percent, respondents would use these tools for scheduling different services.

Providers wield significant influence in whether a member is open to being a more active participant in managing her own health. However, the survey indicated that providers are not using that influence to steer patients toward virtual care options, with only 11 percent of members responding that their provider recommended digital health tools to them.

Thus, to maintain the current momentum of digital and virtual healthcare, payers can closely coordinate their efforts with providers, encouraging them to offer digital and virtual healthcare solutions when appropriate.

Payers can also keep in mind experts’ qualifying refrain about the continued need for in-person care.

“Marry digital/virtual care with physical care to provide effective, trusted, reliable services physically and at-a-distance,” Accenture urged. “The new healthcare system will rely on seamless, coordinated care that provides people with the right attention, services, therapies and products anytime, anywhere, to instill confidence, safety and respect across all moments.”