Telehealth Business Models: An Assessment Tool for Telehealth Business Opportunities in Remote Rural Communities

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of when the potentially offsetting considerations favor telehealth investments. To that end, we provide users with a financial template to assist them with the business model question of “how is value delivered to my customer and at what cost?” – assuming that the customer(s) may include a primary care provider, a specialist, an insurance company, a health care system, the entity paying for travel, and patients. The financial template allows users to enter their site specific estimates regarding changes in referral patterns with and without telehealth and the revenues and costs that result from the changes in referral patterns. In addition, we provide a spreadsheet to enable the user to estimate the potential value of patients’ time saved by avoiding travel and the value to patients of reduced wait time in the queue for specialty care. In addition, we provide a number of illustrative business cases primarily designed to show the potential complexity of the inter-relationship of parameters and assist users with understanding how they might use the template to build business cases for their particular circumstance. We also provide several examples of sensitivity analysis to assist users with understanding how they might use the template to develop “break-even” analyses and identify when the changes in referral patterns and case mix might trigger a need for increased staff or result in longer queues.