Telehealth exploded in 2020, and it’s become more common in the broader healthcare landscape. But there’s still work to be done for patient access, Brandon Hirsch, MD, said.
Dr. Hirsch, a spine surgeon with Newport Beach, Calif.-based DISC Surgery Center, discussed what’s next for telehealth on the “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast.”
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: What do you think will be some of the next big game changers in telehealth?
Dr. Brandon Hirsch: As patients become more comfortable [with telehealth], and it becomes more commonplace, that will improve both their comfort with using technology to have a discussion with the doctor. It will also help doctors, offices and practices get better at the ins and outs of getting telehealth set up in a reliable way. If you talk to people in practices that weren’t really familiar with telemedicine, some had technological obstacles to overcome to get their telemedicine platform up and running. But fortunately, with technology like Zoom or any of the other platforms, it’s now become a very easy to use and highly reliable way to see patients.
I think it does a number of things that are beneficial for both sides. For patients, we live in an era of convenience … where convenience is at a premium in any part of our life. If you look at any other part of our life, technology is constantly making things more convenient and saving us time. So why wouldn’t that be helpful in healthcare, where time and resources are scarce for both patients and their physicians? As the technology and comfort level gets better, the adoption and the widespread use will get better.
Q: What do you want to see in terms of telehealth access?
BH: During the pandemic, Medicare passed a series of regulations that enhanced or expanded coverage for telemedicine because they didn’t want anybody seeing people in person at that time. Those regulations had time limits on them, and as we got through that the expiration dates got kicked down the road by six months or a year multiple times, and actually right before the most recent shutdown was the expiration of the most recent extension.
During the [2025] government shutdown, there was a period of time where Medicare was not going to cover telemedicine except for very narrow exceptions, and naturally the commercial payers will always follow suit of what Medicare does. We experienced a period of time where there was no telehealth access through traditional insurance pathways, and that really irritated patients and caused disruptions. What I think needs to happen is Medicare needs to permanently outline the coverage for telemedicine that will then have the commercial payers follow suit and provide cover for it. No one can ever say exactly what the commercial payers will do, but they tend to follow Medicare policies and guidelines.
Then beyond that, there’s the integration of telemedicine into the rest of our software ecosystem and healthcare like EMRs, both office- and hospital-based. Right now, a lot of the software platforms have integrations for telemedicine, but I’ve had limited experience with them. I find they’re not as reliable as a product like Zoom and maybe not as intuitive for patients to use because people are just most familiar with what they use in other parts of their life. That’s going to be the next phase. How do we integrate the telemedicine experience into the rest of our healthcare software ecosystem to make it a seamless transition?
