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Virtual care predictions with a side of humble pie

July 28, 2020


Virtual care predictions with a side of humble pie

Back in January, I made four predictions about what I thought would happen in virtual care this year. In this week’s vlog, I revisit those bold predictions (spoiler alert: there’s lots of humble pie to be served up) and even make two more for the rest of the year.

Here’s the predictions from earlier this year, and my updated take on each. 

  1. More healthcare providers are going to choose an EMR for their virtual care, where patients and payers will choose ANY other option. This one was sort of right. A lot of health systems did move to their existing EMR, but they also migrated to solutions, like Fabric. 
  2. DTC telemedicine companies (Ro, HIMS/HERS, Blink) will do more visits than all health systems combined. WRONG. COVID-19 completely blew this prediction out of the water. The existing healthcare providers rapidly reached for virtual care solutions to be able to treat their own patients and they’re visit volumes speak for themselves.
  3. Consolidation within vendor space will be the theme for 2020. I was both right and wrong on this one. On one end of the spectrum, companies are seeing a thriving market with a ton of M&A and investment and on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the smaller, upstart companies that I thought would be gobbled up or run out of business seeing some success. 
  4. The Apple Watch will become the most important health data collection tool on the market. While there’s been great progress and investment in the Apple Watch, it’s at a slower pace than I had anticipated. The watch is still important, but COVID-19 has proven that the smartphone is in fact the most important health data collection tool of 2020. 

And because I didn’t learn my lesson the first time around—here’s two more predictions for the remainder of the year: 

  1. COVID-19 will continue to drive the emergence and progression of virtual care. This one seems obvious. But it’s the non-COVID related visits that are going to continue to drive this growth. 
  2. We’re going to see a renaissance in virtual care in the quality of tools, products and services available. By being at the front-end of healthcare, it’s going to force companies to improve and innovate at a rapid pace. 

So my predictions may not have all been entirely true. COVID-19 came in and dramatically changed the virtual care landscape. I’m curious, what predictions did you have that were right or entirely wrong? Do you have any for the remainder of the year? I’d love to hear from you.

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