Home / Blog / 6 Hospitals See Impressive Telemedicine ROI
When an organization needs to cut costs, there’s often a huge downside. Lay-offs. Fewer comp days. Cuts. It’s a list we’re all familiar with, and yet we still cringe when we see those words.
Reader- I’m telling you it doesn’t (always) have to be that way. Innovation is all around us, and every day there are breakthroughs that make business more efficient and nimble. When it comes to cost savings, telemedicine is one of the bigger breakthroughs of our decade. It’s no secret that the market has taken notice. According to a recent study, most employers either offer telemedicine as a benefit or plan to offer it by 2018. From a consumer standpoint, telemedicine fulfills the demand for accessible and inexpensive healthcare. From an employer’s perspective, telemedicine is a way to offer employees a useful benefit without breaking the bank.
Yet like anything new and flashy, there has been an ongoing conversation about the ability of telemedicine to deliver true value to an organization. Leaders want surety that the long-term gains will outweigh the upfront investment. It takes time, onboarding, training, and money to bring on a new program. Relationships need to be built with the vendor; new processes developed. It’s understandable why employers want sound metrics under their belts before embarking on the un-trodden territory.
That’s why we’re downright pleased to introduce our new Cost Savings Report. We’ve compiled data from six hospital and health systems over the past year, tracking things like how often employees used the service, how many times a high-cost treatment was avoided, and how many work hours were saved. We also gave special consideration to those all-important financial indicators. We tracked savings from employees choosing a telemedicine session over a visit to an urgent care unit or emergency room (hint: a lot!), and how more productive time in the office translated into dollars saved.
But our favorite number from the report has to be 56. When calculating the profitability ratio of our program, we were thrilled to see that our hospitals and health systems saw a 56% return on their investment.
When an organization offers a telemedicine program to employees, it is one of those rare win-win. Employees get a cutting-edge benefit; employers incur huge cost savings and see more productivity from their workforce. We encourage you to download our cost savings report to see just how beneficial telemedicine can be to your organization.
You can download the report here.
Happy Savings!