Inside STAT: Telehealth visits are dropping, forcing providers to recalibrate

(STAT; ADOBE)

The surge in telehealth use at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic has begun to drop, and health care providers are now being forced to recalibrate their offerings. Telemedicine visits accounted for nearly 70% of health encounters back in April, but only 21% of health visits in the middle of July as people are increasingly returning to in-person meetings with their providers. And while telemedicine now still accounts for a bigger share of health visits than it did before the pandemic, hospitals that rushed to train staff on conducting virtual visits are now experiencing something of a whiplash. “We’re trying to right-size, but it’s really hard because during the pandemic we switched to nearly 100% virtual in some clinical areas, and we know that’s not realistic or sustainable,” Jessie DeVito, director of virtual care at the University of Michigan's health system, tells STAT's Casey Ross. Read more here.