Heather Bonome, Pharm.D.: Telehealth Has Improved Collaboration Between Providers

While telehealth is traditionally defined as between a patient and their provider, the use of telehealth to connect providers has been important and has allowed for better collaboration, said Heather Bonome, Pharm.D., director, pharmacy URAC.

Transcript

So, there's a lot of different definitions to telehealth. A lot of times we think of telehealth as being a video chat between a patient and a provider. But telehealth can be defined as a patient of provider, a provider to patient or provider to provider. So, there's the whole concept of provider to provider, which is also really critical.

And there are a lot of different platforms that we've seen that enable providers to communicate that way and really collaborate at a whole different level. A lot of health system specialty pharmacies that already have a platform for that kind of interaction have really been able to embrace that and connect with the clinics that are prescribing it in a whole different way. And we've seen that increase pretty significantly.