Webinar Transcript

Pivoting to Telehealth

Play Video

The following is the transcript from our webinar with Henry Schein Medical called Pivoting to Telehealth. 

00:00 Tony Baratta

Good afternoon, and welcome to Henry Schein Medical’s COVID-19 webinar series, Pivoting to Telehealth. On behalf of our entire team, we wanna say thank you for all that you do, and we cannot say thank you enough for everything that you’re doing to help patients during this challenging time. And lastly, we wanna thank you for the time that you’re giving us today in this busy… In the ever-changing and busy day in and day out that we’re all dealing with. Thank you again for the time that you’re giving us. We’re gonna go ahead and get started.

 

00:37 Tony Baratta

First off, my name is Tony Baratta. I’m the senior manager for our solutions team here at Henry Schein. I’m gonna serve as the moderator today. And in our webinar, we will learn about having… How important it is to have the right team in place to ensure patient trust when pivoting to telehealth. Our webinar is gonna cover three key areas, the short-term and long-term implications of the shift to telehealth from an employer, employee and hiring, and retention standpoint. Secondly, how to successfully find and ramp up teams that can thrive in a remote working environment, and we know that this is not easy. And lastly, in the webinar, we are gonna learn how to ensure that you’re hiring for the right skill set, I.e. Technology savvy, and also are they a cultural fit for the organization.

 

01:37 Tony Baratta

But before I introduce our Talentcare team, I wanna do a little housekeeping in terms of our participation instructions. Currently, you are all in a listen-only mode, so you won’t be able to ask questions verbally. However, by simply clicking on the question icon, you can submit questions throughout the presentation. At the very end of our presentation, we will go ahead and address those questions, answer those. You can also post in the chat icon at the very bottom of your screen, and we will also answer those questions at the very end. We did disenable the raise your hand feature for this presentation. With that being said, we’re gonna go ahead and get started. I’d like to introduce our Talentcare team. First, we have Eric Smith, the CEO and Founder of Talentcare. And we also have Ninad Pandit, who is the Senior Vice President of Client Delivery. Eric, Ninad, I’m gonna turn it over to you.

 

02:41 Eric Smith

Thank you, Tony, and thank you to all of the people at Henry Schein that have asked us to do this and worked with us on it, including Michael Casamassa, Sanchia Patrick and Jen Valente. We’ve been fortunate enough to have a partnership with Henry Schein for about four years now and really value that relationship. Just a couple of sentences on Talentcare, so you know who you’re talking to and listening to today, we started the company about seven years ago. We are healthcare-focused, and indeed, I guess through luck, who knows, I have been working with clients working in the telehealth space, particularly around talent, for five of those seven years. And so we’ve learned, not only from the earlier days of telehealth, but also the recent days, as we’ve just all gone through COVID and so we’ll try to learn some things together about that. As Tony mentioned, my colleague, Ninad, who really leads the relationships with our telehealth clients as well as is our resident expert on the subject as it relates to [03:53] ____ is along with me today.

 

04:00 Eric Smith

COVID, and the pandemic, and the lockdowns, all of those things together, really have significantly increased the focus on telehealth. Obviously, CMS cleared the way for even more telehealth during this time with their 1135 waiver that you may be familiar with, depending on your business model. But we know that telehealth is here to stay. And so today, we want to think about certainly the technology, the regulatory and reimbursement issues surrounding that, but particularly today, we’ll focus on the people issues. It may seem like a heavy lift for those of you who are considering it for the first time, but at least on the people aspects of things, we hope that this is helpful to you.

 

04:51 Eric Smith

A few facts just to get us started, some indications of what’s happening in the market, let’s start with the patient, with the customer first. Patients are saying that they are increasingly willing to try telehealth, many of whom have done it during the pandemic, but the data tells us that people are willing and trusting of that technology and that care mode more than they ever have been before.

 

05:25 Eric Smith

Secondly, if you think about providers, institutions, care facilities, and so forth, you’ll see that it’s really had an impact on them. And you probably can look at your own organizations and see that as well. Most of them have had financial hardships. Even hospital systems that have been treating those with COVID have had some impacts to them. And studies have shown that in order to just get back to where they were financially, they’ll have to operate for the next six months at 110% of capacity. That’s not 110% of what they were doing before, that’s 110% of capacity. Of course, if you think about your own facilities, your own businesses, that’s awfully hard to imagine how one could do that. And so the first thing to do is to look at how one can increase capacity without big capital expenditure, and that’s where I think telehealth can come in.

 

06:34 Eric Smith

And then finally, thinking about your competition, we know that even prior to COVID, if you asked providers, healthcare providers generally, the vast majority would say that they are likely or very likely to move to telehealth in the next 12 months. Well, that 12 months got accelerated into about 12 days or, in some cases, 12 hours. A case study we’ll go through actually speaks to specifically that. And so these are your fellow providers but also, in many cases, your competitors. And so when you look at it from the patient perspective, the provider perspective, and from your specific competitor set, telehealth is obviously very important to consider.

 

07:25 Eric Smith

As we move through here, what we’re going to do now is take you through four quick case studies that we hope will expose the issues you should be considering and thinking about as you think about telehealth and how it affects your business. We’ve picked from across healthcare, medical behavioral people who are actually in the telehealth space and providing that care directly to draw out as many of the issues that need to be considered as possible.

 

08:00 Eric Smith

Our first one here is one of our longest-standing clients. They are in urgent care, close to 15 locations regionally in the southeast. They’ve been in their markets and very stable in terms of number of locations for about a decade now, a trusted, strong brand, recurring patient load, etcetera. And I was talking to many of our CEO clients during the pandemic, and he told me a story that was really pretty interesting. He said, in the back half of 2019, they had taken one of their providers, one of their physicians, and asked her to spend 50% of her time thinking about how they could implement telehealth in their business model. They’re in urgent care, in immediate care, pretty traditional way of delivering that. And as they looked at the technology, the economics, the regulations, and just down to their staffing models and the logistics, they just couldn’t quite figure out how to do it.

 

09:10 Eric Smith

And then about mid-March, COVID hit, and within 24 hours they had implemented telehealth. And this may be a story that you’re familiar with or you even saw it yourself, they were basically using iPhones, in some cases, with the physician in one room and the patient in the other room, to eliminate any risk of infection and so forth. And so a great story, innovation moving quickly, those stories are nationwide. Now, they have to go back and consider what they were considering before, which technology platform is the right one? How will they remain compliant with regulations, reimbursement and the like? But they’re also, of course, having to turn to the people issues, and the issues that have been front of mind for this client are, “Where am I going to recruit my people? Am I going to go for ready-made, if you will, telehealth workers or am I going to hire for that attitude and train them out over time, build out the process of telehealth for our organization?” That’s the question they have to ask themselves. We know that the competition for experienced teleworkers, telehealth workers, will be fierce. It already is. And so one of the first questions they had to answer for themselves was, “Do I go after the ones that are already doing it, or do I find the right people and train them up?”

 

10:39 Eric Smith

The second thing that they’re considering is, and having to think through, is what we call here the not-the-same-old-job ad. The branding of this company to the labor market would have been a traditional, family-feel, comfortable, rural, small town doctor’s office kind of culture, if you will. That would have been their employer brand. Today they need to change that a little bit. They need to explain that they are, yes, that, but also telehealth. And they need to explain to the prospective employee what the benefits are to them. That’s what can be represented on a career site. And on a web site, of course, it needs to be represented on any sort of job ads and even job boards. And so that’s one thing that they’re looking at significantly, and something that you may want to consider as well.

 

11:34 Eric Smith

And then finally, they’re realizing that telehealth workers are a different breed. The person, the nurse practitioner who wants to go into a clinic, and be tactile and touch people, and be with the team is a different person in terms of personality make-up and what really drives them to work every day than the person who is working in a remote environment or working over a screen. And so understanding that, being able to analyze it from an industrial psychology perspective, personality tests, if you will, and the like will be important.

 

12:08 Eric Smith

But it’s not just that, it’s also the technology. Think about some of your colleagues, and which ones are technically savvy, and which ones aren’t. Those that are comfortable with things like megabits per second, how fast their internet is, and can engage electronically and visually with the camera rather than looking off somewhere else, all of these small things make the experience for the patient at the other end comfortable, that it’s a service that they’ll want going forward. So, that’s one set of issues coming from an urgent care environment.

 

12:57 Ninad Pandit

Thank you, Eric, and everyone. This is Ninad Pandit, pleasure to be here. We’re gonna now move over to another case study. This is a multi-location regional eye care group. And for this group, their primary issue at COVID hit was a significant reduction, as everyone on this webinar can certainly attest to, I’m sure, is a significant reduction in patient visit due to COVID. These were brick-and-mortar locations for eye care, and this is a group that, unlike the case study Eric just mentioned, they had never considered telehealth previously, they simply never needed to. And because of the social distancing requirements, capacity restrictions due to COVID-19, the name of the game here has been how to generate that 110% capacity that we mentioned earlier that would be needed in order for their business to recover? And the most logical and the first way that came to mind is to make a pivot to telehealth.

 

14:05 Ninad Pandit

But as they did this, and as they try to do this and have been successful, the question and consideration that came up was, which services should really be considered for telehealth? Not all services that you offer and that they offered were applicable or feasible to deliver in a tele model. And so their thought process was, one, “We’re gonna go ahead and start with the initial visits, and,” two, “the check-ups, the routine check-ups that could be delivered in a tele environment.” And I should point out here that, as part of this consideration of which services they thought about which ones are fully reimbursable, and that’s something you may certainly want to think about as well, so that was a clear part of the consideration when choosing to make the move.

 

14:50 Ninad Pandit

From a people implication standpoint, they had to consider and understand that their consumer brand is not the same as their employment brand. And what I mean by that is, in many cases, your first and initial reaction as you pivot to telehealth is going to be, “I gotta show my consumers that I’m pivoting to telehealth. I have to make sure that they know we’re doing this so I can maintain my numbers and patient volume.” And while that’s absolutely true and important, you also need to remember and can’t forget that there is a employee of a worker-provider viewpoint that needs to come into play here as well. And that is that the labor market and your prospective team members that you need to facilitate and execute on telehealth will also need to re-message as to the shift that you’re making so that they can understand and evaluate the job to which they’re applying to and see that you’re clearly… You have a telehealth offering or a position that they’re able to work remotely. As part of that, you need to differentiate between your employment brand and your consumer brand. And so the employment brand is the story that tells the prospective candidate what to expect, what are the benefits of joining your organization and being able to work from a telehealth standpoint.

 

16:15 Ninad Pandit

So, this is where, as we call it, remote isn’t remote. Not all frontline workers, not all providers are necessarily set up to work from home. People have family considerations, technological limitations, communication limitations, and so forth. And so this client, this eye care group, did something very smart. They set up remote telehealth locations. I know it sounds a little oxymoronic, but what I mean by that is, they set up remote locations where their team could go in and provide telehealth services to folks in the room, or office, or at home next door. And this was especially valuable for frontline non-providers, who might have a higher rate of inaccessibility to technology or connectivity. And so this allows them to not only be able to connect to their patients, but also allow them to learn together, work together, again, within allowable distancing guidelines, and continue business operations while minimizing the connectivity risk. So, it’s a way to think outside the box, and set up your structure and your business to where you make the pivot, and employ these considerations and resolve the space and capacity issues.

 

17:44 Eric Smith

This next small case study is in the autism space. So, we moved from urgent care and vision, now into behavioral. As many of you know, the autism world is a very face-to-face personal interaction between a behavior tech and a child. But what’s also very important in this model is that the family is the entity, if you will, the group of people that is consulted about the care, obviously not the child, and so both of those interactions are very important. This particular company is up in the Midwest. They are known and very innovative in the way that they’ve created plans and care.

 

18:36 Eric Smith

As an example, one of the things that they did in one of their clinics, in one of their locations, is to build out a mock apartment, in which they teach heavily autistic children to be independent on a day-to-day basis and so been living in that environment. They have other examples like that as well. They are an innovative group, but their business is very, very personal and always in person. And then COVID hit, and what that did to their business, of course, is that many families were afraid to bring their children in, number one. Number two, many families’ rhythms had been disrupted. And so you have parents that are home that haven’t been home and kids that haven’t been home, and so forth.

 

19:29 Eric Smith

So, it really did disrupt their business, but they quickly spun up a telehealth capability, a secure capability, so that they could continue the conversations with the families. And even though they weren’t billing for anything at that point, they wanted to keep in touch with the families, help them with mechanisms, coping mechanisms and so forth, during that time while the children are home and not coming in for their sessions. And they learn something through this. They learned that that secure telehealth conversation with the families about care was powerful, number one, and fully acceptable to the families and actually very efficient.

 

20:14 Eric Smith

So, as they now think about the future, they’re thinking about how this helps them grow. There were some suburban and ex-urban markets around the cities that they’re in. They’re in Chicago and in cities in Wisconsin, and so forth. And they wanted to move out into the suburbs, but their clinic-based client capital intensive build-out would have included that. Now, they can do something different. Now, they can offer in-home care, where the families feel a little less at risk when only one person is coming to their home and their environment, rather than sending their kid into a place where many people have been all day. And they’re using… And so it’s still a face-to-face discussion, still face-to-face care, but they’re having those remote discussions now with the families through that secure telehealth environment.

 

21:09 Eric Smith

And so it’s allowed them to grow and to serve people who have been underserved in those ex-urban environments, and it’s created some real efficiencies for them. So, for these folks, the takeaways here are, it’s not always about the point of care that has to be telehealth, sometimes it can be a step back from that, maybe the decision makers or the family members. And then it also can allow a re-jigging of the model, of the care model, of the business model, to go into people’s homes rather than just in a clinic environment in this case.

 

21:51 Ninad Pandit

Thank you, Eric. And we’re gonna talk about one more, one last case study here. This is a very interesting one in that this is a national telehealth provider of mental health services for nursing homes and long-term care facilities. And the interesting part here is these guys were set up already for telehealth, and they were executing extraordinarily well. Such as their established business model, they were successful, they were delivering care into the facilities. So, what we wanna talk about today in this case study is how are they doing it pre-COVID, and what happened when COVID hit, and what did they learn from it? 

 

22:35 Ninad Pandit

One of the keys to their pre-COVID model has been, they employ what they call facilitators that are a part of a supporting team that physically go in to the center, the long-term care facilities, the nursing home, to talk to the existing staff and the administrator and the patient at the individual facilities. There are also the liaison and helping set up the technology with the provider and doing all of the logistical setup. So, they’re multi-faceted, they’re wearing many hats, and juggling a few different things. The key really was always, for this group was, they understood the importance of their frontline facilitators, of their frontline supporting role. They understood and knew that this was the key to delivering fantastic telehealth services and, I just said, overall the key to their success.

 

23:36 Ninad Pandit

Well, then COVID hit, and these facilitators now are shut out of the facilities. As we all know, COVID hit particularly hard at nursing homes and long-term acute care facilities. And so these facilities shut out anyone that wasn’t a permanent member of their staff, anyone coming in from the outside, if you will. And so the question became, “How would services continue to be provided during this time?” And so a pivot was needed, and we talked about being tactile and being able to shift. So, this is where, within the world of telehealth, a pivot was needed. And that pivoting required attracting people with the right skills and the right technical abilities to now be able to work from the confines of their own home rather than driving, being mobile, going into facilities, and so forth.

 

24:34 Ninad Pandit

And so, the real lesson here was, someone that is a frontline worker that is mobile and driving and interacting with patients and facility administrative staff on a face-to-face basis may not have as necessary, may not have the inherent personality or skill set as a pure teleservice provider from the standpoint of working from their own home might. And so the question in consideration really became, “How do we find this new group of people? How do we market to them?” And as far as those considerations with the COVID disruption to the standard way of doing things was also, how do we enhance our technology to make it simpler so that they can facilitate and set up the logistics, the technology, and set up the communication with the provider from a purely remote standpoint now? And so this group enhanced their technology, they made connectivity simpler, and this allowed them to expand their market share. So, even though their team didn’t have access, physical access to the facilities during the lockdown, they are still able to expand their market share and expand into territories and areas that they weren’t able to before.

 

25:54 Ninad Pandit

And as part of this change, as I just mentioned, in terms of adding in new team members, they’ve revised their staffing model. So, the final takeaway here is no staffing model is set in stone. You need to be able to adapt, change roles, move people between roles or, in this case, hire people who now fit a different model and a different role. They created a new role. They utilize, still utilize disciplined marketing and candid screening. They adjusted their job ads in terms of language, content, responsibilities. And they also revised their screening tools to make sure they were looking for the right skillset and personality that would be successful in this environment and folks that they could account on to be a long-lasting member of their team. A great success story here in terms of, again, the course. Even if you’re doing well and you’ve already moved to telehealth, there may still be some nuances and some changes that will come over time that you may need to be ready for.

 

27:07 Eric Smith

Thanks, Ninad. We hope that those case studies may have drawn out some of the issues that you will want to consider and maybe even have you thinking a little differently about telehealth, as it might affect you. So, what we think we’ll do next year, if that makes sense, is to go into… First of all, summarize a few of the issues that we’ve just talked about, and then go into some practical explanations of what it can look like, give you some examples of some best practice around implementing telehealth, especially around your people. So, as we talked about the need for telehealth is, today it was probably all ready and then COVID accelerated that, and that’s why many of you have joined today. The data tells us that patients are more accepting of it, that providers are more interested in it and implementing much more quickly, and finally, your competitors are already doing the same.

 

28:21 Eric Smith

There’s a whole set of issues that we talked about today around getting the message out. Your employer brand, how you talk to prospective employees, your job ads, your career site, how you post things on job boards, and so forth, all of these things will matter because that’s how potential candidates will find you and will engage with you, if the story is right for them. We’ll spend a good bit of time on this in particular. And then in terms of ramping up or shifting your team, the staffing model and so forth, there’ll be several things that we’ll want to talk through a little bit. The first, as we mentioned, is determining your recruiting strategy. Are you gonna go after existing people in the market, or are you going to train and create your own team and your own process? Next thing will be your staffing model. What is your mix between frontline roles and the provider roles? Frontline roles, getting that right can be just as important as anything in an elegant telehealth model. And then finally, selection tools. Finding the right people for this particular job and in this mode will be critical to not only performance and care quality, but also retention.

 

29:49 Ninad Pandit

Thanks, Eric. And so, as we mentioned, we’re now going to shift and talk about some of the tools and the tactical items you can do in order to make this pivot and be successful with it. Part of the story is branding, tools, screening, data, and as we like to say, sprinkle in a little bit of magic to make it happen.”

 

30:15 Ninad Pandit

Starting off here, as we’ve mentioned, look at your brand, and the articulation of your employment brand as it differentiates from your consumer brand is really vital in making this pivot. The example on the right here shows you how mentioning healthcare as part of both your consumer brand and then into your employment brand creates that consistency and ensures that you are getting the message out to the entire population that you need to get it to in order to be successful, again, both your patients, and your prospective providers and frontline folks.

 

31:06 Ninad Pandit

This next section here looks at and shows you examples when it comes to your messaging, such as your job openings. At the top, you’ll see that it’s clearly mentioned and advertised that these providers can practice clinical psychology in your home from any location and within any state that they’re licensed in. The key benefit here is, as we know, each state has loosened or changed the requirement in for licensing and practice. And so this may open up an audience or an avenue in order to attract tough-to-find providers that may not necessarily be in the state that you need them to be in. There may be options of being able to do interstate telemedicine, and being able to find those and opening up the funnel for where you’re finding your team.

 

32:03 Ninad Pandit

In the blue, in the middle, on the right, you’ll see that the language around your job ad is important, mentioning the convenience of being able to work from home, mentioning the benefit, that you’re willing to train, promoting the benefits that you offer in your workplace. This client here clearly promotes these benefits of telehealth using the text. And also what you’ll see is, on their website and career site, they actually also utilize a short, effective video, which helps to draw in applicants, so utilizing a variety of media and outreach and messaging, again, helped ingrain that message so that a prospective candidate feels that you are truly prepared and truly ready, and are an expert in execution of telehealth, rather than someone who might just have made the change more recently. And even if that’s the case, that’s okay, as long as you’re able to articulate the clear message and gain the trust of your prospective applicants.

 

33:10 Ninad Pandit

And at the bottom, it shows that the job ad title also makes a difference in terms of how you promote your messaging. You can see “telehealth” is prominently mentioned at the beginning, of the job title. This obviously speaks to the prospective candidate, but even more importantly, this ensures that when job seekers are searching on various mediums such as Google or Indeed, and other places, that your job ad will show prominently because they’re searching for keywords that are tied to telehealth. And so that keyword algorithm, search engine optimization, you don’t have to be scared of, but it is certainly an integral part of making sure you’re making the right pivot and doing the right… And executing correctly.

 

34:01 Ninad Pandit

What we see here next is the importance of your screening tools and systems. So, you also need to have a assessment tools, screening tools that are able to support your shift to telehealth, and that allows you to select the right candidates. This assessment tool here is an industrial psychology tool that evaluates the candidates based on a variety of cognitive work style and cultural preferences to ensure that you’re able to emulate your best performers, and that you’re able to select and hire top performers who are going to do well for you, and equally importantly who are going to stay with you to avoid the high cost of turnover.

 

34:51 Ninad Pandit

The next example here is of a screening questionnaire. How are you going to ensure that you select… In addition to the right personality or cultural fit, how are you going to select folks who have the right skill set, technology, equipment, and readiness to join a telehealth organization or make the shift to telehealth and provide those services? So, specifically asking questions around their technology, their ability to either commute or work from home, the ability to have the right technology and comfortability with that setup while working on their own without day-to-day physical one-on-one in-person support is key to understanding that. And so making sure you adjust your screenings to get the right people for your organization is key.

 

35:44 Ninad Pandit

Next, we have, and we wanna understand, what does this all mean from a data standpoint? How are you using data and metrics to understand both your successes and your opportunities? Do you have access to the right reporting and tools to help you make those decisions? Part of this is looking at things such as where are your best candidates coming from. Where are your hires coming from? What are the sources that they’re coming from? And how much are you spending? Are you spending enough? Are spending correctly? Where’s the biggest bang for your buck? It’s important to understand and track these metrics, especially as we know that this is going to be a highly competitive market for telehealth candidates. As Eric mentioned in one of the earlier case studies, figuring out whether you are hiring ready-made or make-ready will play a part of this. And so understanding your market, your labor market, and whether you need to be hiring for aptitude or for attitude, those decisions can certainly be made when you have the right data, too, to make those evaluations.

 

36:57 Ninad Pandit

As part of your hiring process, when you have candidates coming into your funnel, you’ll certainly want to look at the data. Why are candidates choosing to take a position with your organization? Why are they choosing not to? Are they looking for a specific schedule? Are you able to offer that schedule? Should you offer that schedule? Is it something about compensation, whether it’s the base salary, whether it’s a broader compensation model, whether it may be other benefits? Might it be a geography consideration, based on the need and what you’re looking for. So, understanding those reasons as far as why candidates are choosing you and also why they’re not choosing you, it’s very helpful in making key decisions here.

 

37:45 Ninad Pandit

And then as I’ve mentioned before, ultimately turnover is key. Is your onboarding process, if you’re hiring and recruiting process, are they working well? Are they fitting into your culture? Are you showing them the love? Are they the right fit during the early stages? And so evaluating your turnover, both overall on an ongoing basis but also intrinsically as far as when folks are leaving, and what steps and decisions you need to make to keep the best of the best is equally important. Again, overall data, metrics, and understanding your entire process is key in terms of how you separate yourself from getting ready in this world of telehealth that we have already moved to and will continually move to in the coming months.

 

38:44 Eric Smith

Thanks, Ninad. These are the issues, some of the issues that we’ve talked about today. On the left hand side, of course, some of the key points around people issues. There are other issues as you think about telehealth, of course, on the right. We are now open to taking some questions, but first let me, on behalf of Ninad and the rest of the Talentcare team, thank you for your attention today, and we look forward to answering any questions.

 

39:16 Tony Baratta

Hey, Eric, we do have some questions that have come in. The first question, you mentioned competition for healthcare workers. What are you currently seeing? 

 

39:28 Eric Smith

Yeah. I think it’s probably intuitive for all of us that if all of a sudden telehealth is of higher demand, that those who have the skills to do it will be in higher demand and therefore competition will be fierce, and that’s certainly borne out by the data. We were actually doing a full team meeting here the next two days, and we’ve been looking at some pre and post-COVID data just for our own education of our own team. And for those that are in the telehealth space, meaning those who had been advertising telehealth jobs before COVID, and then continued to advertise those jobs and have those jobs open, we measure those in three different ways: How many people are coming to the career site looking for that using that search word, how many people click the “apply” button off of a job ad, and then how many of them actually end up being interviews by our clients.

 

40:29 Eric Smith

And so we can see that data and the data, as you would expect, before and after COVID, up to two times the number of hits on the career site, meaning people who are looking for the word telehealth, and a job in that space, the “apply” button is… The percentage of people who hit the “apply” button, actually they came to it, they looked at the telehealth job and said, “Yes, I want to apply,” is even higher than it was before. This tells us that there are people that have been not in the telehealth world that are looking for those jobs, and then finally up to 2X the interviews. So, you can see the labor market responding to the demand that everyone knows is coming. And this kind of competition and this flood of both supply and demand, in a way, is going to highlight the need for, again, an ability to attract but also an ability to screen candidates as they come your way.

 

41:36 Tony Baratta

Got you. The second question that just came in is, how should I expect to pay a telehealth worker versus an in-clinic worker? 

 

41:54 Eric Smith

It’s very interesting, and I think the net of it is it’s gonna be different. It’s not exactly the same. The rhythm of the business, the rhythm of that job is not the same, and the economics may not work out unless you do it a certain way. So, many before COVID and it will be the same after. Many of the telehealth jobs were paid on a PRN basis, or even a per visit kind of basis, a per function, per session kind of basis, that gives flexibility to the telehealth provider, but also some flexibility, financial flexibility, for the organization. And so we would expect that to be the case, many times we get that question from our clients. The most important thing around compensation will be staying close to the market. I’d like to tell you that we know exactly what’s gonna happen, but frankly this is a different world. The supply and demand dynamics, as I just talked about, are very different from pre-COVID.

 

43:01 Eric Smith

And this highlights what Ninad was talking about there on his last couple of slides around data. If you can’t track, for instance, for your MAs or your nurse practitioners that you’re talking to, if you can’t track why they’re declining you because they’re being paid more, and all you have is anecdotal data, it will be very difficult to respond. And so capturing that data at the point of decline, asking how other people are paying will actually be very important. We would expect some change in the way people are paid, and certainly a change in the quantum that certain providers are being paid. But in any case, the headline there is it’s not going to be the same as you’ve been paying your clinic-based or location-based staff.

 

43:54 Tony Baratta

Good question. Another question that we have is, can telehealth be combined… I’m gonna read this here. “Can telehealth be combined with mobile healthcare to add community services, I.e. Contact tracing, vaccination services?”

 

44:21 Eric Smith

I think the answer to that is absolutely yes. And, in fact, there are some companies that have already been doing that mobile, maybe not always in community-based health as defined, but there’s a company, as an example, called Catapult Health that sends, usually medical assistance to employer sites, and they do testing, and screening, and they’re actually now screening for COVID. That’s part of their basic model, they help keep workforces healthy, and now they’re keeping them safe and healthy. And they are doing that by sending people out to where they are, in the community, at their workplace, wherever they might be. And then combining that with nurse practitioners who are in a large center doing telehealth visits for those employees and those people who need some care and some consultations.

 

45:22 Eric Smith

We see lots of innovative models like that, even before COVID, that are now being used, if I take the questioner’s question right, now being used to help with the pandemic and testing employee or employees as they come back to work. And, of course, that likely could be extended to contact tracing in the same way.

 

45:54 Tony Baratta

Excellent. I got a question here that came in also, “If our company has not started implementing telehealth, what are the first steps in providing that service?” And actually, from a Henry Schein standpoint, we have a wide array of telehealth offerings. We have daily demonstrations, if you go to our corporate website, Henry Schein Medical, you will see we offer from a video-only standpoint a demonstration every day at 2:00 Central time. I would encourage that’s a good place to start, at least to see our video-only presentation. But we also have a full platform of telehealth, and that company is called Medpod. But with that being said, that would then pivot to this webinar and to what Eric, then Eric and the Talentcare team, can come in and also assist in the recruiting and everything that they’ve covered here.

 

46:51 Tony Baratta

Hopefully I may have helped with that, but I think the first step to start implementing telehealth is to see what’s available for your practice, and that could start with Henry Schein Medical. We have a full platform called Medpod that has everything from a video-only solution, all the way on up to what we call cart based with diagnostics, etcetera.

 

47:15 Eric Smith

Yeah. If I might just add on to that, Tony, we would agree, as much as… We live in a world of people and talent and caring for those employees and talents and so forth, but if you were to ask me that question, “How do I start? What’s most important?” Obviously, the patient model is the most important thing, does this actually solve the problem at the patient level. And secondly, can you afford it, what’s the business model? And then I would absolutely agree with you completely, Tony, that the technology, and the platform, and that delivery model, and it’s absolutely true that Henry Schein’s got a very strong offering there, but that’s the next thing. If you can get past those three, then I think you’re into the world of staffing models and so forth, but you’ve got to solve those others first, and I would completely agree with you about the technology platform.

 

48:15 Tony Baratta

And along those lines, a question came in, “What standard should providers use to decide what services to offer through telehealth?”

 

48:28 Eric Smith

Well, I can only tell you, I’m no expert in the sense that it’s not a decision that we have to make inside our company, but I can just tell you what our clients talk about and how they’re thinking about it. And they think about it first in terms of, again, “Does it meet with my patient’s need, what my customer needs?” Depending on, again, the business model. Is it meeting their needs and does it enhance, number one. Number two, there’s a revenue impact to all of this, of course. And reimbursement, whether that’s CMS or payer reimbursement, is critical to it. And then finally, can you make it work? We’ve seen a lot of people before COVID try a telehealth model, and they just could never make it to where it wasn’t a drain on the financial resources of the company or a distraction operationally.

 

49:28 Eric Smith

I always start with the patient, with the customer. And then will the revenue support it, and then move from there. There are other companies, as we talked about, with our eye care client as an example, that are thinking of this as a way of expanding capacity and getting more revenue into the physical center by doing certain things outside the center and in telehealth. So, where you have an opportunity to move… And again this gets back to the reimbursement thing, when you can move certain care touchpoints to a reimbursable model not in a physical space, that’s obviously a very good way to approach it as well.

 

50:21 Tony Baratta

And, Eric, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least say to the audience that, along those lines, we have a SolutionsHub, it’s www.henryscheinsolutionshub.com, that has a full plethora of resources and information in regards to not only telehealth but all the areas of a practice from clinical, financial, and operational solutions that could have a big impact on not only how you deliver healthcare but also driving efficiencies. And we also have an e-book that we have put together that does give cases that you can refer to in terms of telehealth and other areas, in other areas that are available to you. And you can find that again on our website, it’s www.henryscheinsolutionshub.com. And there is a lot of resources there for you.

 

51:19 Tony Baratta

And I believe that is our last question. I do wanna say, once again, first, thank you to each of you for attending our webinar, and the time that you’ve given us today. I also would like to thank the Talentcare team, Eric and Ninad, for this great webinar and overview that you’ve given. I believe it’s very, very helpful. We cannot thank you enough, on behalf of Henry Schein once again, for all that you’re doing and all that you do. And we really appreciate your time, once again, today. Have a fantastic rest of your day, and thank you once again.