A new report says healthcare organizations are finding value in using ambient AI to reduce burnout and stress, but financial value is harder to assess
Ambient AI scribes may be all the rage in healthcare these days, with more than 60 different products on the market. But are they showing ROI?
A new report from the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) says AI scribes “are poised to become one of the fastest technology adoptions in healthcare history.” But as a task force convened by PHTI learned, healthcare executives may be rushing to implement these tools before determining their value.
The challenge, as always, comes in the definition of value. Many healthcare leaders who are using AI scribes report success in reducing physician stress and burnout, a key metric in today’s healthcare environment. Yet with health systems and hospitals struggling to contain costs, there’s a financial aspect to technology implementations that has yet to be realized with scribes.
According to the PHTI report, the task force launched with a question: Can a new generation of AI solutions that target administrative tasks and day-to-day workflow improvements address the previously intractable tension between increasing productivity and reducing provider burnout?
The answer is, well, complicated.
“Ambient scribes appear to reduce burnout and cognitive load and improve the patient experience,” the report stated. “The current evidence for ambient scribe improving productivity directly by reducing documentation time is mixed, though as the technology and implementation processes improve, time savings may become more apparent. Given the costs and limited evidence to date on ROI, however, there is a real risk that as ambient scribe adoption continues apace, health systems will implement solutions in ways that add to overall costs of care.”
The task force noted that healthcare technology market has often evolved faster than the effort to produce meaningful results, and this is certainly true in AI. Healthcare providers are jumping on the bandwagon and piloting new tools and services well before they have a good idea about ROI—or, in many cases, governance.
This experience is also causing healthcare leaders to step back and assess what value means to them. Faced with a declining workforce and pressures to reduce workflows to keep the people they have, some executives are pointing out that a tool that can improve a clinician’s work-life balance and reduce stress does produce positive ROI, and financial savings will show up in reduced turnover and hiring and training costs, not to mention morale. And that, in turn, will positively affect clinical outcomes.
But that will take time. And that seems to be the one factor that many overlook.
“There are many other areas of health system administration ripe for transformation with AI-enabled technologies,” the task force concluded. “AI in RCM is likely to be the next significant area of at-scale solution deployment, and task force members anticipate significant progress in AI for call centers, quality and regulatory reporting, inbox management, and CDS in the coming years. “
“The promise of AI in each of these areas is compelling but the ability to deliver on that promise will take time, enhanced technological sophistication, and organizational maturation,” the report said. “The experiences of early adopters can inform the broader industry on whether the investment in these technologies is warranted, how to measure impact and track progress, and which technologies are delivering outsized returns.”
Here are three tools that nurses and nurse leaders can use to prioritize their wellbeing.
Focusing on wellbeing is critical for nurse leaders who want to combat burnout and lower nurse turnover rates.
For CNOs who want to prioritize wellbeing and self-leadership for their workforces, Diane Sieg, a registered nurse, author, and the creator of the Well-Being Coaching Initiative, suggested "CPR," but not in the traditional sense of the term.
"CPR stands for compassion, presence, and recovery," Sieg said. "It's not the CPR that nurses are familiar with, but [it's] just as lifesaving because it infuses more energy, more engagement, [and] more connection into your work and life."
In small towns where the doctor is a neighbor and the hospital is the biggest employer, new ideas like AI and telehealth face a much tougher path to adoption.
Rural critical-access hospitals are struggling, and they're looking at innovative ideas like telehealth and AI to keep the doors open. But what works in the big city won't necessarily work in a small community.
And that's what makes innovation such a hard sell in rural America.
"We're very cautious when the word 'partnership' comes into the conversation," says Susan Gutjahr, HIT Director at Sparta Community Hospital, a 25-bed hospital in Sparta, Illinois, a city of roughly 4,000 residents in the southern part of the state. "We don't want to lose our local connection. That's who we are."
For small hospitals like Sparta, new technology offers the promise of improving care, but it can also rob the organization of its identity—a valuable commodity in rural communities where the hospital is often the biggest employer and the doctor is a neighbor. Hospital leaders looking to keep their hospital afloat have to understand that the promise of innovation doesn't apply equally to every organization.
"What can new technology really bring to us?" asked Gutjahr, who attended the HIMSS 25 conference and exhibition earlier this month in Las Vegas "to physically see everything that I get e-mails about." For hospitals that are often the lifeblood of a rural community, the idea of buying things just to keep up with the big guys isn't always best.
Different Communities, Different Priorities
During a panel on rural healthcare challenges at the ViVE 25 conference this past month in Nashville, Rachelle Schultz, President and CEO of Winona Health, an independent community health system based in southeast Minnesota, said she has to balance new ideas with specific workforce demands.
"Our challenge is to really rethink the work," she said. "It's a very different landscape today. … Our really experienced people have retired, and the incoming people have different expectations," she said.
Schultz said her hospital had to invest in a simulation lab because some of their new hires are ill-prepared for the hospital. Some nursing and allied health programs are cutting out clinical rotations in order to get more students out the door and into health systems, resulting in a new wave of hires that need more training on basic patient care.
"In a lot of cases they've never laid hands on a patient," she said. "This puts a burden on our supervisors and our managers [to use the lab} to reinforce the education and the training."
As a result, she said, there's less money to spend on other technology.
"We need new technology probably more than most folks do," added Ryan Thousand, Fractional Chief Information Officer at Dahl Memorial Healthcare, a critical-access hospital in Ekalaka, Montana that's more than two hours away from the next healthcare facility. "It's something that we really have to be on the innovative edge of, but unfortunately we don't have anyone to feed and water that after we put it in."
Thousand said he has to focus on using whatever he has and "creating that vanilla base layer that allows us to innovate." That means avoiding a new EHR or virtual care platform and focusing on base-line technology just to be connected.
"My IT team could fit in the trunk of a Prius," he said. "And I can't go out and buy that shiny new car. I would love to have Epic Connect. I have Dwight, but he's 65 years old and he drives a tractor every day to my office" just to see a doctor.
Telehealth Is a Bad Thing?
Scott McEachern, CHCIO, Chief Information Officer at Southern Coos Hospital & Health Center in Bandon, Oregon, said they invested heavily in the Epic Community Connect EHR to tackle interoperability challenges. He said it was crucial that his small health system create a platform to try and hold onto patients who, through telehealth, have more options for care.
That struck a chord with Mountain.
"People talk about telehealth like it's the best thing that ever happened; it's the worst thing that ever happened," he said. "They can now get their care from their house [instead of coming] into my facility."
Telehealth may allow small hospitals to connect patients with specialists and services that aren't available in a rural facility, Mountain noted. But it also gives patients an opportunity to see what they can access elsewhere—to the detriment of a small, local hospital that needs those patients to survive.
"Now you're sending them off for that additional care and you're just praying that they come back," he said.
Schultz, whose health system has used a Cerner/Oracle EHR since 1989, said she's encouraged by the integration of AI into the EHR, which would improve what she called "the bane of our existence as providers."
"There is no Amazon-like experience with our current EMR systems," she said. Adding AI, however, "is what I would consider breakthrough technology."
Mountain was less optimistic.
"AI is not going to work for me right now," he said. "I've got gravel roads. At the end of the day if you bring a blade in that's made for asphalt, it's not going to work. And that's where I'm at. The emerging technologies for us are still the shiny objects that are out there, and we're just trying to get to those less-emerging [technologies]."
Community Comes First
The challenge with bringing in new technology, the panelists said, is that it affects not only the hospital, but the entire community.
"Most of us are the largest employers in our community, so we're critical not only for healthcare but … for the economy of the cities that we're in as well," said Linda Stevenson, Chief Information Officer at Fisher-Titus Medical Center in Norwalk, Ohio.
"In rural areas technology is a force-multiplier when it comes to your economy," Mountain said. "I'm the largest employer in town, and that's not a good thing. For the hospital to be the largest employer in town is kind of scary. So at the end of the day, If I take a job away from somebody and I start bringing in AI, that's all they start talking about. They don't care about the efficiencies."
Mountain suggested attracting new technology like AI into the community, but having it develop in other businesses first, rather than the hospital. The community would see the benefits economically in new and better businesses, and then the hospital could embrace the technology to improve care.
At the end of the day, how a rural community embraces technology is far different than how an urban city looks at innovation.
"We have kiosks, and we have people who come in who will not use kiosks," noted Schultz, adding that Winona Health doesn't use patient portals because some patients want to call their doctors instead of messaging them online.
"I think we have to be careful that we're not interrupting what is really a valued relationship that people have with their doctors, their nurses, their therapists, and so forth, and make it too techy," she said. "Because at the heart of it, it is the connection of people."
"We can swing too far if we're not paying attention," she added.
That's what concerns Gutjahr, at Sparta Memorial Hospital. For a rural hospital, a partnership might just mean giving patients new opportunities to seek care elsewhere. With that in mind, she was at the HIMSS conference to look at new technologies and ideas to improve patient engagement and staff retention.
"We need help to hang on to what we have," she said, noting clinicians will come to Sparta to get their foot in the door, then move on to bigger and better paying opportunities. "That's a real challenge.
CNOs must look at metrics that will help them leverage virtual nursing through the future and continue to improve the experience for nurses and patients.
On this episode of HL Shorts, we hear from Jennie Van Antwerp, director of digital acute care at OSF OnCall, about the ROI metrics CNOs can use to make a financial case for virtual nursing. Tune in to hear her insights.
CNOs must look at metrics that will help them leverage virtual nursing through the future and continue to improve the experience for nurses and patients.
On this episode of HL Shorts, we hear from Jennie Van Antwerp, director of digital acute care at OSF OnCall, about the ROI metrics CNOs can use to make a financial case for virtual nursing. Tune in to hear her insights.
Hospitals are testing AI in the Emergency Department, where clinicians face high rates of burnout and need tools to help them create a better medical record.
Generative AI is proving it's value in the doctor's office, where the doctor-patient encounter is usually structured and quiet. Now healthcare leaders want to apply that technology to the Emergency Department, where very little is controlled.
At Atlanta's Emory Healthcare, ED clinicians are using Abridge Inside for Emergency Medicine, a generative AI tool designed to organize, maintain and update the patient's medical record through the disjointed and often interrupted journey from admission to discharge.
Tricia Smith, MBBS, MPH, FACEP, an emergency physician at Emory University Hospital Midtown, says the technology has the potential to reduce time spent gathering disparate patient data, giving clinicians a more efficient path to diagnosis and treatment.
And that's a critical pain point in a hospital's most stressful environment.
"If you have a complete story on the first encounter that you have with the patient, you're able to streamline your workflow," Smith says. "It seems like a minute here, a minute there, but those things really add up in a chaotic environment."
Emory is one of a handful of health systems that have integrated the AI tool into the Epic EHR platform for ED use over the past three months. Abridge officials say the technology taps into Epic's ASAP module to capture the salient points of the conversation, identifying key words and different speakers, and create a medical record that a clinician can drop into and out of as needed.
One of the bigger challenges of the ED is the disparity of the information needed to treat a patient, especially one who may not be conscious or able to communicate. Clinicians in this environment are gathering data from paramedics and EMTs, family members, visual exams and whatever they can find that's already in the EMR. They're developing a medical record out of these unstructured pieces of data, while also stepping in and out of the room to deal with other concerns.
Smith says that workflow extends to the end of this journey as well, when the patient is either discharged or admitted. That medical record needs to be complete for the next care provider, either in the hospital or at home, as well as the patient's insurer and the hospital's revenue cycle department. And AI can help organize that process.
"I have to write these words in this order in this context so the patient can understand exactly what I mean, so the insurer can understand exactly what I mean," Smith points out. And right now we haven't hit that sweet spot for emergency care to make sure that the note has all of those check buttons matched just yet."
Smith says it's likely the technology will need to be fine-tuned as it spends more time in the ED, encountering as many different distractions and roadblocks as possible. That includes making sure the technology is really helping clinicians—burnout rates for this group are among the highest in the hospital setting, running from 50% to 70% in several recent studies.
Smith says ED clinicians face unique challenges, exacerbated by the environment. There are many different points of pressure on their cognitive workload, and it can easily be more difficult to gather and organize the right information than to make a diagnosis. The right tool for them isn't necessarily the one that will help make the diagnosis, but will help them on the path to that diagnosis.
After hearing all the stories about how AI is helping the clinician capture the patient conversation, Smith says she's grateful the C-Suite is looking beyond the doctor's office and into the ED.
"To be quite frank, we felt a little bit left out of the AI conversation," she says. "The majority of these generative AI tools that were being developed were developed for clinic settings, for office settings, where you have a 15-minute encounter. There's a back and forth and there's a neat and tidy conclusion all wrapped up within 15 minutes. But in the ED you're trying to make order out of chaos."
Prioritizing wellbeing requires leadership and individual commitment, says this nurse well-being thought leader.
The term "well-being" is a broad term defined in many ways today, depending on the person and their environment.
For CNOs, well-being programs and initiatives can focus on employee mental health, physical wellness, finding solutions to combat burnout, and creating healthy work environments.
For Diane Sieg, RN, CYT, CSP, the definition is simple.
"Well-being is how you feel about yourself and what you do every day," Sieg said. "Self-leadership is making the best decisions for yourself that supports your well-being."
Sieg, who is a registered nurse, author, coach, and creator of the Well-Being Coaching Initiative, explained to HealthLeaders that nurses traditionally don't always prioritize their own wellbeing, since they are so focused on patients, families, and their communities. Nurses know what to do to take care of themselves, they just don’t often do it.
However, there are major quantitative and qualitative benefits to CNOs and other nurse leaders focusing on nurse wellbeing.
"When nurses that feel good about themselves and what they do every day, they are less stressed and more connected, engaged, and energized in their work and in their life, which is what wellbeing can do for us," Sieg said.
The ROI of wellbeing
According to Sieg, the quantitative benefits of well-being can be found in improving retention and the bottom line. Through a pilot of the Well-Being Coaching Initiative started during the COVID-19 pandemic, Atrium Health reported a 30% improvement in stress, burnout, and engagement that correlated to a 30% reduction in turnover and $3 million in savings in one year.
There is also qualitative value in wellbeing.
"I have witnessed these nurses transform in their careers and lives," Sieg said. "They get promoted, create new positions, go back to school, and engage in and lead projects, because when you prioritize yourself, you have more to give, period."
To measure the ROI for well-being, Sieg recommended using standard validated assessments to measure burnout, engagement, stress and self-compassion. As with any new initiative, it's important to track metrics before, during, and after implementation.
"We measured self-compassion," Sieg said, "and then lastly was self-leadership, because we want to understand where [the nurses] start and where they are immediately after [intervention], in our case it was the coaching."
Prioritizing well-being requires leadership and individual commitment. Well-being initiatives must be supported by leadership as a benefit to recognize, acknowledge and value their nurses and the vital role they play in patient experience and outcomes, Sieg explained. Nurses need to commit to making changes by practicing self-leadership with the skills, structure and support provided.
The CPR method
For CNOs who want to prioritize wellbeing and self-leadership for their workforces, Sieg suggested "CPR," but not in the traditional sense of the term.
"This CPR stands for compassion, presence, and recovery," Sieg said. "It's not the CPR that nurses are familiar with, but [it's] just as lifesaving because it infuses more energy, purpose and meaning in your work and life."
The practice of compassion, according to Sieg, specifically refers to compassion for yourself. Nurses can have very high expectations of what they can accomplish in a shift, and when they don't meet those unrealistic expectations, are critical of themselves, Sieg explained. explained.
"Nurses have plenty of compassion for others, but what we don't have is compassion for ourselves," Sieg said. "Being kind to yourself is giving yourself a break, literally and figuratively, because you are human and require it."
The second practice is presence, which, to Sieg, is slowing down to experience the present moment fully. When nurses are focused on all their unfinished tasks, they can't engage with themselves or their patients as effectively, and this leads to more stress, exhaustion, and feeling overwhelmed.
"To be present to yourself is to realizing when you're overwhelmed, hungry, or grumpy, and then asking for help," Sieg says. "This focusing on yourself first, supports you to give your best to everyone and everything else."
The third practice is recovery, which to Sieg means finding ways to re-energize yourself, not just on vacation, or days off, but every day.
"[It's the] idea of filling yourself back up, doing things that help you feel good about yourself, that bring you joy," Sieg said, "not for hours, but even a few minutes of listening to your favorite music, creating some quiet space, moving, or getting outside to help you reset and renew yourself."
Incorporating these practices into nursing must begin with leadership.
"It's very important for nurse leaders to role model and support these practices for themselves and their staff" Sieg said. "Leaders need to treat themselves with kindness and not run themselves ragged, slow down to engage with staff, and prioritize their own recovery to support their staff to do the same."
For CNOs who are just starting a new wellbeing program, Sieg emphasized the importance of fully committing to it.
"Whatever you start and initiate, I encourage the nurse leaders to continue, so it is not a one-and-done program," Sieg said. "Well-being is about culture change and it takes time, consistency, and commitment, but it is so worth the investment to empower our nurses."
To learn more about the Well-Being Coaching Initiative, you can contact Diane here: diane@dianesieg.com.
At HealthLeaders’ Virtual Nursing Mastermind event this week in Atlanta, chief nursing executives discussed how the health system of the future will use technology to reinvent the care team.
As healthcare organizations look to transform care delivery, their innovation plan had better begin with the nurse.
Virtual nursing is one of the more popular concepts in healthcare these days, with health systems and hospitals trying out a wide variety of technologies and strategies focused on reinventing care delivery. And at a recent HealthLeaders Virtual Nursing Mastermind live event, it became clear that this is where healthcare leaders want to start when they talk about the health system of the future.
For the roughly 10 nursing executives attending the Mastermind event this week in Atlanta, the path to transformation begins with the nurse, who is most often closest to the patient, and any meaningful change that reduces waste and cost and boosts outcomes has to focus on improving the patient’s healthcare journey.
The challenge, then, is figuring out how a nurse should fit into the patient’s care journey, and how today’s healthcare ecosystem gets that wrong. Beginning with inpatient care, from the ED to the hospital room, nurses are currently called on to do many things they really don’t have to do. Technology like AI can take on those tasks and give nurses back the time they need and want to care for patients.
That new nursing workflow, Mastermind participants said, should be part of a much larger reinvention of the care team.
Indeed, a growing number of health systems don’t even want to call the platform virtual nursing, and are instead focusing on care coordination and management, a strategy that pulls in all the members of the care team, from clinicians to specialists to pharmacists to technicians.
In that model, technology becomes the foundation upon which each member of the care team can do the tasks they were meant to do—clinicians providing care to patients, and others providing support or handling education and administrative duties. A virtual care platform would then be more like a call center, handling incoming requests and directing them to the right care team member.
According to the Mastermind participants, as healthcare leaders develop the hospital of the future, that virtual care platform will extend outside the hospital, coordinating services that extend to other healthcare sites, even the home. But this platform will only work if the technology sits in the background, gathering and assessing data and handling the tasks that would normally put nurses and other care team members in front of computers instead of patients.
The HealthLeaders Mastermind seriesis an exclusive series of calls and events with healthcare executives. This Virtual NursingMastermind series features ideas, solutions, and insights onaccelerating your virtual nursing program.Please join the community at our LinkedIn page.
To inquire about participating in an upcoming Mastermind series or attending a HealthLeaders Exchange event, email us at exchange@healthleadersmedia.com
Nurse leaders should leverage both virtual nursing and multidisciplinary care teams to remove burdens from the bedside nurse, say these nurse leaders.
Virtual nursing will continue to become the standard of care in health systems across the industry.
However, there are still several roadblocks that stand in the way of virtual nursing becoming the perfect solution for staffing and care delivery issues.
The HealthLeaders 2025 Virtual Nursing Mastermind program participants met earlier this week in Atlanta to discuss their virtual nursing programs and the outcomes they have achieved so far. There are two key points that CNOs can take back to their health systems to help fine tune their own virtual nursing programs.
Involving multidisciplinary teams
From the beginning, the selling point for virtual nursing has been that it will remove burdens from the bedside and give time back to nurses. However, the Mastermind participants made it clear that virtual nursing is not going to solve every problem that nurses are facing in the industry. Nurses are burnt out, and while the addition of a virtual nurse can help offload administrative tasks such as admissions and discharges, there are still plenty of tasks that could be outsourced to other departments in a heath system.
Since nursing is the largest part of the workforce, it has become easy to pass things off to nurses. However, according to Derek Godino, senior program director of nursing at Geisinger and Mastermind participant, nurses should be able to rely on multidisciplinary teams to support them and remove some of their burden. The participants emphasized that not every task currently being completed by a nurse needs to necessarily be done by RNs.
To Godino, it's time to reimagine workflows at a system level.
"We have to disrupt the health system model, not individual care team models," Godino said.
To the participants, leaders should consider relocating tasks to multidisciplinary teams in addition to assigning them to virtual nurses. CNOs and other nurse leaders should also look at other industries to see how they are successfully integrating technology and try to adapt some of those strategies into their own healthcare workflows.
Reimagining the bedside model
The second takeaway from the participants is that the traditional models of care at the bedside are no longer going to be enough to sustain nursing. The nursing shortage will continue unless nurse leaders are able to incentivize people to become nurses and stay in the workforce. Virtual nursing can be one solution for that, along with incorporating other technologies such as AI and ambient listening that can further remove tasks and documentation burdens.
According to Stephanie Johnson, executive director of system virtual care for UnityPoint Health and Mastermind participant, CNEs, CNOs, and other nurse leaders must advocate for investment in technology as tools that will allow nursing to continue as a profession. The pitfalls of not investing in technology will greatly outweigh the potential savings.
"The CNE needs to be able to envision virtual nursing and other augmented resources as the way in which we will remain viable as a nursing workforce," Johnson said.
To the participants, an ideal virtual nursing program would involve consolidated technology with a streamlined user interface that allows the nurse to follow the patient throughout their entire care journey. It would take into account best nursing practices, get other disciplines involved, and ultimately enable nurses to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, while recentering their time with patients as the focal point of the profession.
There's more to come from the 2025 Virtual Nursing Mastermind program, so stay tuned for more coverage and the final report.
The HealthLeaders Mastermind seriesis an exclusive series of calls and events with healthcare executives. This Virtual NursingMastermind series features ideas, solutions, and insights onaccelerating your virtual nursing program.Please join the community at our LinkedIn page.
To inquire about participating in an upcoming Mastermind series or attending a HealthLeaders Exchange event, email us at exchange@healthleadersmedia.com.
Congress has extended telehealth and Hospital at Home waivers through September. This may be the healthcare industry’s last chance to prove their value.
But the six-month extension isn’t making things any easier for healthcare execs looking to plot long-term strategies. And while supporters are taking heart in the fact that Congress has consistently kept these programs in view, they also know that the cycle of kicking the can down the road has to end. Either Congress or the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) makes these waivers permanent, or they end them once and for all.
This gives healthcare leaders the summer to make their case for permanent CMS support of telehealth flexibilities and the Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCAH) program. That means finding and showing data that proves these flexibilities are saving money, reducing complexity and improving clinical outcomes.
Are we ready for the Summer of Telehealth?
Supporters, beginning with the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) and extending to the hundreds of advocacy groups, healthcare organizations and lawmakers that have signed so many letters calling for waiver permanence, have long lobbied for a multi-year extension of anywhere between two and five years. That time frame, they argue, is necessary for healthcare leaders to conduct their studies and pilots and gather the data they need to support these programs.
That’s particularly true of the Hospital at Home movement. Close to 400 health systems and hospitals across the country are following the CMS model, which qualifies them for Medicare reimbursements but is quite complex. Others are forgoing reimbursements to develop their programs to treat patients with acute care needs at home (or, in some cases, a SNF or rehab center).
Stephen Dorner, MD, MPH, MSc, Chief Clinical and Innovation Officer of Mass General Brigham’s Healthcare at Home program, says the regulatory uncertainty is slowing down growth, and he worries what will happen if the waivers are ended. But at the same time, the fact that so many healthcare organizations have invested in this strategy means it does have value.
“We’re in this journey to build out the whole continuum of care in the home” he said at the recent HIMSS 2025 conference and exhibition in Las Vegas.
Dorner is part of a Hospital at Home program that’s widely considered to be one of the best in the country, with services that impact a growing number of patient populations, from those with chronic care concerns to veterans. Supporters point to the published studies by the health system showing how the program saves money and improves clinical outcomes; critics, meanwhile, note those studies are small and hyper-focused, and there’s no guarantee the program can be scaled and sustained.
Dorner says the industry needs time to prove its value—and to tinker with the model to find the right mix of efficiency and outcomes.
“I don’t think that the way it’s structured now is necessarily that way it will be structured forever,” he said. “We need more of a critical mass of information” to prove what works and what doesn’t.
The same goes for the collection of pandemic-era waivers on telehealth expansion and use. Virtual care comprised a small percentage—roughly 15%--of all healthcare interactions before the COVID-19 crisis, at which point providers scrambled to put as many services as possible onto a telemedicine platform to help overcrowded hospitals and enable patients and providers to connect and isolate at the same time.
With the end of the pandemic, many patients expressed a desire to see their providers in person again, swinging the telehealth pendulum in the other direction. Some mistakenly assumed this would be the end of telehealth, but the technology had done enough to reduce access pain points and improve outcomes that patients still asked for it and providers found a way to integrate virtual and in-person care. As a result, the waivers were continued.
Which brings us back to the road ahead. With the waivers extended until September 30, the healthcare industry has the summer to prove the value of these flexibilities. They know the extensions won’t go on forever, and with each passing Congressional action the drumbeat is growing to end them and move on.
Supporters can’t keep recycling thank you notes to Congress and the White House for these extensions and vow to continue working to make them permanent. They’ve been doing that for the last two years, and nothing has changed.
