For a technology to be effective, it must be used. And in skilled nursing facilities, the question of ease of use — and, with it, the changing of habits — was always central with telemedicine. But those days of reluctance look like they’re over.

Sound Physicians has seen a 200% increase in utilization of its integrated telemedicine model among SNFs compared to past iterations of telemedicine. This increase is due to a combination of factors, including comfort with technology due to COVID-19, better workflow integration, change in acuity and changes to reimbursement, says Brendan McNamara, CEO of Telemedicine at Sound Physicians. It has led to a steady increase in business for Sound just in the last few quarters alone.

“We’ve rounded a corner with SNF telemedicine,” McNamara says. “When we launched our program four years ago, we believed we could improve clinical and financial outcomes with engaged on-shift physicians. Today, we’re doing it at scale, and it’s impossible to imagine SNFs operating without 24/7 physician coverage in the future.”

That 200% increase is one of three key datapoints that reveal how telemedicine is at long last delivering on its full promise for skilled care providers. It’s been a long journey, but for all involved, a fruitful one. And Sound Physicians has been at the center.

How the pandemic changed telemedicine forever

Like many aspects of health care, telemedicine usage was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a clear demarcation line in 2020, and McNamara is pleased that Congress took notice.

“I think you could describe pre-COVID where technology enabled the delivery of clinical care via video, but there wasn’t a reimbursement environment to support it and there wasn’t an acceptance of its efficacy as a clinical model widely within the health care industry,” he says.

“Now, in the post-COVID new normal, reimbursement rates have been confirmed for the next few years via the most recent congressional budget, the Omnibus Budget Act, which means reimbursement is confirmed through 2024. You have physician practices, like Sound Physicians, that provide an additional layer of clinical support to skilled nursing facilities when they need it most.”

Congress did not act in a vacuum, of course. As higher-acuity care became the norm in SNFs, telemedicine usage rose, since SNFs did not receive the reimbursement required to hire additional staff, the types who would give them the capacity and capability to deliver care for those patients.

“For skilled nursing facilities to survive and thrive, they need to be able to appropriately handle higher and higher clinical acuity while still delivering good outcomes,” McNamara says. Telemedicine became a viable solution — a cost-effective way to add clinical capacity, and even physician capacity, that’s less than the cost of even one CNA, he says.

“This is a relatively new capability of telemedicine being used to deliver its promised value, which implies both that it is delivering a lot of value today and historically, it perhaps did not,” he says. “To me, we’re seeing almost a victory lap — this has finally proven its value and it’s working and is being rapidly embraced by the industry of skilled nursing facilities.”

Delivering on the promise of telemedicine: 3 key datapoints

For telemedicine to succeed in SNF, it cannot disrupt clinical workflow for nurses. Instead, it has to integrate seamlessly, with full integration into EHRs. That’s what’s happening with Sound Physicians today.

“We have solved the last piece of the puzzle, which was making it easy and intuitive for on-site clinical staff to use telemedicine, even with nursing turnover and staffing challenges,” McNamara says. He sees three datapoints that tell the tale of the new age of telemedicine in skilled nursing.

• More calls. As McNamara notes, purely from a volume standpoint, Sound is now seeing a 200% increase in telemedicine usage for its integrated model. It’s an astonishing figure that defies the antiquated notion that health care workers will always hold on to the technology they’re used to.
• Highly effective care. The 200% increase isn’t the only jaw-dropping figure. When Sound Physicians receives a call from a SNF, 96% of the time they are able to treat those patients in place.
• Reduced readmissions. As a result of that effective care-in-place ability, Sound has reduced 30-day readmissions by 12.5%, according to its analysis of adjudicated claims data.

“One of our anchor customers, after they deployed telemedicine, saw reductions of 70 to 80%, which are just crazy numbers,” he says. “These are examples of a facility or group of facilities that because they got telemedicine, and because they lowered their readmission rate, they were able to enter a high-quality network for a payer that they had not been accepted to before. That was hugely meaningful for them.”

The Sound Physicians difference

When it comes to Sound Physicians’s results, SNFs are taking notice. Sound closed more business in the 4th quarter of 2022 than it did in all of 2021, and it closed more business in the first five weeks of 2023 than it did in the 4th quarter of 2022.

“The growth is exciting and we’re thrilled to support the industry as it embraces change,” McNamara says.

He credits this expansion to not just the evolving landscape and increased technology comfort among nursing staff, but to Sound’s specific experience and their tight integration with PointClickCare.

“Even as a telemedicine provider, it was still a big open question: was this going to work in skilled nursing facilities? A year ago it was an open question. Now it’s not. It will be in the vast majority of skilled nursing facilities within the next couple years. So it’s an interesting inflection point for the industry to adopt this new clinical model.”

This article is sponsored by Sound Physicians. To learn more about Sound’s TeleSNF program, visit soundtelemedicine.com.