By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

“We have to look at telehealth as an operating system.” Amwell ($AMWL) President & CEO Roy Schoenberg has a way with analogies, and some of his best land in this interview as we get a highly detailed, insider’s perspective about how payers and health systems are rethinking telehealth as a result of their experiences during the pandemic.

Bottom line: The pandemic taught us that telehealth can be used to deliver a much wider variety of healthcare services than just urgent care and, so the whole idea of ‘telehealth’ is changing from healthcare product to healthcare infrastructure. Mental health care, physical therapy, medication management, primary care, and more have all moved to telehealth and, along with that shift, the “rules of engagement” around those services have started to change.

Payers are looking to become the “digital front door” for their members – providing primary care and navigation. Health Systems are increasingly looking to use their own docs for urgent care, rather than outsource that relationship and miss the potential to build trust with local patients. And, in all this, Roy argues that healthcare’s biggest buyers have stopped looking at telehealth as a “product” and, instead, are starting to see the opportunity to “rewrite their future” around a view of telehealth as infrastructure, as one of healthcare’s “foundational systems” intertwined with (and as mission-critical as) their EHRs or claims and eligibility systems.

My favorite analogy starts around the 20-minute mark, when Roy explains this operating system idea by drawing comparison to how individual Microsoft programs (think Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint) would be infinitely less powerful if they were not running on the same operating system and able to easily transfer information. Another good one? How both the buying and provisioning of healthcare is being re-thought digitally, just as online shopping not only changed buying habits but also changed supply chain for retailers. If you’re looking to hear the latest on what’s happening in telehealth post-Covid, learn how things have changed for payers and health systems, AND also want to dip into Amwell’s market positioning a bit, you’ll love this deep-dive.