Amwell is acquiring two digital health startups for a combined $320 million as the publicly traded telehealth company looks to expand its platform offerings beyond the Covid-fueled virtual care boom. The two companies—SilverCloud Health and Conversa Health—are part of Amwell’s strategy to work with patients along their entire care journey and not just limit the relationship to one-off virtual visits. “The magic is what happens when you bring them all together, when you use technologies to surround the patients in their reality on a regular basis,” says Roy Schoenberg, who serves as co-CEO of the Boston, Massachusetts-based company alongside his brother Ido. The way to achieve this “omnipresence,” he says, is to use automation to move beyond the usual supply and demand constraints in healthcare.
Rep. Elise Stefanik on Wednesday backed a measure meant to expand telehealth services for patients and medical providers especially in rural areas after a sharp increase in the service during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many forces have been driving the growth of telehealth over the past decade, including value-based reimbursement models, population health management trends, and technology advancements. As we have discussed in previous blog posts, the COVID-19 pandemic was the jet fuel that propelled telemedicine utilization into the stratosphere. This growth was, in large part, due to the necessity of limiting in-person contact to avoid widespread COVID-19 transmission.
The Hawaii State Department of Health says it will be bringing telehealth services to 15 libraries in under-served and rural parts of the state at the end of this year, thanks to federal funding.
COVID-19 hastened the adoption of telemedicine by health care providers and insurers, ensuring the practice will extend beyond the end of the pandemic. Now, a new law is ensuring the same will be true for dental visits.