Telemedicine start-ups are placing themselves for a post-pandemic world

Telemedicine, in its initial type of the telephone call, has been around for decades. For individuals in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, speaking with a physician over the phone has frequently been the go-to approach. For a big swath of the world used to taking half a day off work just for a 15-30 minute doctor’s consultation, it may seem like telemedicine was invented only last year. That’s mainly since it wasn’t till 2020 that telemedicine, in its myriad forms, debuted into the mainstream consciousness.

Telemedicine has actually dealt with an uphill battle to become more relevant in the U.S., with challenges such as conference HIPPA compliance requirements and insurer reluctant to pay for virtual check outs. When COVID-19 began raging throughout the world and individuals had to remain home, both the insurance and health care industries were required to adjust.

“It’s been said that there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen,” said StartUp Health co-founders Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes in the business’s 2020 year-end report. That statement couldn’t be truer for telemedicine: Around $3.1 billion in funding flowed into the sector in 2020– about three times what we saw in 2019, according to the report. A health tech fund and insights company, StartUp Health counts Alphabet, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz as a few of its co-investors.

Now that people see the benefits and conveniences of “calling a doc” from the kitchen table, health care has actually altered permanently. It’s difficult to predict how health care institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that offer services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.

The state of telemedicine

Significant gamers in the field now take a look at the state of healthcare as, “prior to COVID and after COVID,” Stoakes told Extra Crunch. “In the post-pandemic world, there’s a considerable change that’s happened,” he said. “It’s all accelerated; the customers have shown up. There’s more capital than ever and consumers and physicians have adapted rapidly,” he included.

In the U.S., health care is firstly a company, so while there are treatment methods that have long been shown to improve patient results, if they didn’t make good sense economically, they weren’t instituted at scale. Telemedicine is an excellent example of this.

A 2017 research study by the American Journal of Accountable Care revealed that telemedicine can be rather useful for handling health care. “Using telemedicine has been shown to allow for much better long-term care management and patient complete satisfaction; it also offers a brand-new means to locate health info and communicate with practitioners (e.g., through email and interactive chats or video conferences), consequently increasing convenience for the patient and minimizing the amount of prospective travel needed for both doctor and patient,” the research study reads.

As we’ve seen, it took a global health care emergency to drive prevalent adoption of virtual healthcare in the U.S. Now that financiers acknowledge the capacity, they are progressively putting money into startups that promise to take telemedicine to the next level. A few of the investors backing these more recent companies consist of StartUp Health, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Alphabet, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Maveron, First Round Capital, DreamIt Ventures, Human Ventures and Tusk Venture Partners.

Article curated by RJ Shara from Source. RJ Shara is a Bay Area Radio Host (Radio Jockey) who talks about the startup ecosystem – entrepreneurs, investments, policies and more on her show The Silicon Dreams. The show streams on Radio Zindagi 1170AM on Mondays from 3.30 PM to 4 PM.