Telehealth Intelligence: A Market Opportunity in Health Assurance

A few months ago, I came across an article, Addressing social drivers of health is a big opportunity for tech entrepreneurs, by Ken Frazier. Frazier is chair of health assurance initiatives at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm, and former CEO of Merck. My curiosity was piqued, so I read the book UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance by Hemant Taneja and Stephen Klasko.

These resources opened my eyes to a fascinating set of market opportunities at the intersection of legacy healthcare and modern technology. It’s called Health Assurance. One opportunity that grabbed my attention was telehealth. Like many people, my personal experience with telehealth increased during the pandemic. According to a 2021 McKinsey & Company report called Telehealth: A quarter-trillion-dollar post-COVID-19 reality?:

• In April 2020, telehealth utilization for office visits and outpatient care was 78 times higher than in February 2020.
• Telehealth utilization has stabilized at levels 38 times higher than before the pandemic.
• 57% of providers view telehealth more favorably than before COVID-19, and 64% are more comfortable using it.

All this got me thinking. How do healthcare practitioners and leaders know how well telehealth is going for the patient and practitioner? Do they have the telehealth equivalent of sales intelligence and coaching tools like Chorus.ai and Gong that use artificial intelligence to analyze calls and provide feedback? Without it, how can healthcare practitioners and leaders know whether they’re providing quality care and a great virtual experience for patients?

Imagine a SaaS platform for telehealth intelligence and coaching that empowers the healthcare workforce to deliver the most effective remote care possible with cutting-edge machine learning. Based on my research, the platform would need robust partnerships with healthcare leaders and policymakers, open technology standards, empathetic user design, and responsible AI. The platform would need to:

• Remove (not create!) burdens for practitioners and patients.
• Deliver more personalized, high-quality provider interactions and patient experiences.
• And result in measurable, meaningful gains in telemedicine effectiveness.

Healthcare regs and privacy could be tough to navigate on a project like this. Finding the right engineering talent could be challenging too. But delivering seamless integrations with the rest of the relevant healthcare toolset could be the biggest obstacle. That’s where a platform like Commure could make things easier. CommureOS is “the first operating system designed for healthcare” according to its website. It’s basically a development platform for building scalable healthcare apps that are compliant and integrated.

According to a 2021 McKinsey Physician Survey referenced on Commure’s website, just 41 percent of physicians believe they have the technology to deliver telehealth seamlessly. The difficulty lies in unifying countless disparate data points across a healthcare organization’s tech stack. A platform like Commure makes it possible to connect these data points seamlessly and make them available when needed in the flow of healthcare with apps you don’t have to build from scratch. The convergence of all these elements is fascinating to me and seems to indicate a market opportunity worth exploring further.

For further research, I’d recommend checking out the companies in General Catalyst’s health assurance portfolio here.