How COVID-19 Stood as Catalyst for Consumer Health Tech Adoption

By Sara Heath

August 11, 2020 – For nearly the past twenty years, Adam Pellegrini, senior vice president of Enterprise Virtual Care & Consumer Health at CVS Health, has had his eyes on the dream of consumer health tech adoption. In recent months, Pellegrini has seen that become a reality as more patients begin to utilize patient engagement technologies.

Like many others in the industry, Pellegrini has seen the promise of consumer digital health — like remote patient monitoring, patient engagement technologies, and telehealth or virtual health access — as integral to creating an all-encompassing healthcare experience.

These tools help keep patients at the center of their own care, becoming activated in their wellness journeys and helping to keep their health coordinated across disparate providers.

“What we saw in 2001 and 2002 was just some of the emerging concepts around virtual care, concepts around social networking healthcare,” Pellegrini told PatientEngagementHIT during an interview.

“And we constantly have seen over those years the small — not hockey stick, but small — inching up of consumer health adoption, typically based off of technographics and demographics. You’re almost following a generation, if you will, that’s starting to become more and more comfortable with new technology.”

That openness to healthcare technology, although slow, has been seen across patient demographics, and has particularly defied age in a way most experts didn’t quite anticipate. More patients than ever are interested in virtual health access, for example, a recent report from CVS Health found.

The report, which featured responses to a survey fielded weeks prior to the initial COVID-19 surge, marked that patients are increasingly interested in secure direct messaging with providers and accessing care virtually.

“But, truly, it was, as the study did articulate, this pandemic that really made an inflection point,” Pellegrini asserted. “It’s almost like a no-brainer, right?”

Across the country, case studies of hospitals quickly propping up a virtual care access and digital care management platform have emerged. Healthcare organizations have leaned on telehealth technology to keep medical appointments open even when they COVID-19 outbreak forced them to close their physical doors.

And using remote patient monitoring tools, healthcare providers are working to keep their most vulnerable chronic disease populations out of any healthcare facility wherever possible. This is happening even in the most rural of areas, like in Pellegrini’s home state of Iowa.

“That didn’t happen three months ago,” he said. “That didn’t happen four months ago, six months ago, pre-pandemic.”

“You are seeing this inflection point in the awareness in digital health, and the awareness is driven by that need for access and safe access,” Pellegrini added.

According to the survey, the number of patients preferring to use digital messaging went up to 41 percent in 2019, when it was at 37 percent in 2018. In the 2020 report, that figure was 48 percent.

“Those are big upticks that the background of the pandemic is really accelerating,” Pellegrini noted.

Similar patterns emerged for telehealth or virtual care access. In 2019, 19 percent of healthcare consumers were interested in these technologies, compared to 32 percent who said the same in March.

For as devastating as the pandemic was and continues to be, it did indeed create the perfect storm to push consumers to adopt technologies more quickly. Although the CVS Health survey was fielded in March before the pandemic had acutely hit the United States, it did predict trends that continued to surge throughout the spring and summer months.

For one thing, patients needed a safe way to access care, something that kept them out of primary care or non-emergency settings when they could avoid it. That’s not to mention the regulatory support providers received to prop up these digital platforms, Pellegrini stated.

New reimbursement models made it more feasible for organizations to use telehealth in the outpatient setting. Meanwhile, relaxed regulations let patients and providers access familiar tools used in other areas of everyday life, like Facetime or Facebook Messenger.

While much of the growth in this technology can be attributed to patient demand, Pellegrini acknowledged the role provider adoption has played.

“Providers are becoming much more comfortable in seeing telemedicine itself as much more valuable,” he said, noting 40 percent or providers are open to using telehealth, up from 22 percent in the 2019 study.

“And the backdrop of COVID-19 is probably at work here as well,” he continued. “Providers saying, ‘I need to take care of my patients. What’s the best way to do it in the current environment?’ Then, they are getting comfortable with that, and then starting to build it into their work flow.”

Most experts, Pellegrini included, estimate patient preference for using digital health technology is going to continue. If a patient becomes used to interacting with her provider using extremely convenient tools, like telehealth or remote patient monitoring technology, she will become comfortable. From there, it’ll be hard to get the genie back in the bottle.

“To me, we must focus on provider experience as much as we obsess about consumer experience,” Pellegrini asserted, saying this is the other half of the equation for sustained technology use.

“If there’s a barrier or even a perceived barrier for a provider to actually provide care via digital means, then it’s going to reduce the adoption rate. It’s going to reduce the desire to change behaviors and use it for the appropriate care scenario.”

This isn’t usually the focus area for digital health developers, Pellegrini acknowledged, noting his own experience in the field. “How will this affect the clinician user?” is rarely a question asked during the technology development process.

“Anyone in the digital healthcare space that’s ever built a product or launched a company, we gravitate to making sure we have the best consumer health experience possible,” Pellegrini explained. “’No friction. It’s just easy. Don’t make me think.’ All of these words are at the DNA of a digital health product’s individual mind set, but where is that same DNA in the provider side?”

Considerations for the end user, paired with careful regulatory planning, will be essential to sustain this uptick in consumer health adoption, although that latter water is harder to tread.

“We’re still learning. We’re still adjusting to broad technology, and we are seeing increased numbers across many geographies,” Pellegrini stated. “At this time, people are still trying to say, ‘how do we make sure people still have great access to digital healthcare tools, to telemedicine, to providers? If they do not want to go in, how can we make sure that they still can do some things over virtual technology?’”

In other words, although many people understand healthcare must identify how to make this penchant for digital health use a permanent change, leadership is still focused on step one, Pellegrini suggested.

Nevertheless, the uptick in consumer digital health use is good news for an industry that has long been stymied by fragmentation.

“The consumer is getting more empowered to go to different places, have their health information on their smartphone quantifying their health on a daily basis. Connected devices and connected apps and wearables are allowing us to stay connected and quantified 364 days of the years, the one day we’re not in the doctor’s office,” Pellegrini concluded.

“Having the ability to really start to connect the dots, if you will, in the healthcare system around data — that’s where we’re going to see that dream of a truly coordinated care team in a virtual sense.”