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Telehealth trends for behavioral health in 2023: 4 key opportunities for growth

November 28, 2022

Telehealth trends for behavioral health in 2023: 4 key opportunities for growth

By Nicholas Chepesiuk, CEO, OnCall Health 

For the last several years, we’ve witnessed a breathtakingly rapid digitization of behavioral health care. This was spurred by concessions made to allow use of technologies like telehealth, which are so crucial to the continued delivery of vital mental health care when the pandemic began, and even now. This digitization creates tremendous opportunities for innovation, from increasing efficiencies and reducing costs by automating workflows, to improving access and outcomes by connecting disparate systems. 

Now, as we transition into 2023, patients, payers, providers, and policymakers are all looking to define the new normal for behavioral health. Telehealth will play an increasingly vital role in how organizations adapt to evolving policies and regulations and scale to meet the evolving needs and expectations of all the stakeholders. In particular, organizations should focus on how these four important telehealth trends will influence their overall business strategy:

  • Telehealth becomes a foundational delivery mode
  • Expanding behavioral health care options with subscription programs
  • The power of technology integration
  • Data drives better outcomes and guides business growth

Telehealth becomes a foundational delivery mode

For many organizations, telehealth may have simply started as adding an option for delivering care via a video call platform. Mounting evidence shows that telehealth offers significant advantages, warranting a much more strategic approach. For patients, it offers convenience and privacy, making care available to many more patients who need it. For providers and payers, it helps ensure equitable access to quality care. By improving efficiencies and reducing costs, telehealth also helps providers reduce the burden on overworked clinicians and staff, which can in turn increase employee engagement and retention. Most importantly, it contributes to improved quality and outcomes for patients. 

Building on the demonstrated successes of telehealth during the pandemic, behavioral health companies should expand the vision of telehealth beyond simple video calls. What’s needed is robust telehealth software that can ensure adaptability to changing regulatory requirements, while also helping to optimize the patient experience and outcomes.

Expanding behavioral health care options with subscription programs

While the policy and regulatory forces driving telehealth adoption during the pandemic have been strong, the simultaneous and rapid consumerization of healthcare is also driving change in behavioral health. For example, forward-thinking behavioral health companies are increasingly offering subscription programs to their patients, and these companies are leveraging comprehensive telehealth software platforms to do it.

By grouping programs together into a single fee charged on a regular and recurring basis, companies can streamline billing, reduce demand on provider time, and create more predictable revenue that drives business growth. Subscription programs might include a regular number of in-person or virtual therapy sessions, patient access to clinicians and staff through secure instant messaging, and on-demand access to educational content to support skills development. For many companies, telehealth software is the ideal foundation on which to build a subscription strategy, giving providers, staff, and patients one central place to access, use, and manage care. By delivering subscription-based services through telehealth software, organizations can evolve care delivery beyond session-based direct care, and ensure greater transparency and accountability with patients and payers alike.

The power of technology integration

For most behavioral health companies, technology has become crucial to running a successful business. But integrating multiple technology systems, vendors, and platforms can be a challenge. Many organizations have so many systems that it can even prevent important work from getting done or information from being securely shared to optimize care and outcomes. With the need for behavioral health care soaring, organizations must find ways to deliver high quality care to more patients that also helps maximize staff efficiency, standardize processes, and reduce time-consuming errors from manual processes. One of the most important ways to enable all this is to prioritize systems interoperability and integration. 

While enabling behavioral health companies to provide high-quality virtual treatment and patient experience, telehealth software can also provide important PHIPA- and HIPAA-compliant integration with the electronic health records system (EHR), customer relationship management (CRM) system, call center, scheduling system, and more. Once integrated, organizations can automate workflows, seamlessly and securely share real-time data, and maximize connectivity. With this secure and compliant integration patients, payers, providers, and staff all have secure access to just the information and capabilities they need, when they need them.

More and better data is driving better outcomes—and growth

This is the age of data, and data use in behavioral health has become increasingly essential. In most areas of medicine, data is already being used to measure care and progress, and adjust treatment based on results. Within mental health care, data use has been more limited, often simply a manually-driven reporting exercise that offers little business value. But with all the digitization happening in behavioral health, data will play a much more prominent role. Whether it’s tracking scheduled and billed appointments, patient engagement across the treatment journey, resource usage patterns, or program completion rates, data can point the way to opportunities to better serve patients, improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and increase care accessibility.

To make all this possible, companies must evolve beyond time-consuming and tedious siloed systems and manual data gathering and reporting. To extract value from all the data, behavioral health companies must lay the groundwork for automating the process of securely collecting, aggregating, analyzing, and making data and data-driven insights available. With a telehealth operations platform that is fully integrated with other systems, companies can gain the objective client- and program-specific data and insights they need to discover what’s working and what needs improvement, all without wasting time on manual processes. Armed with these fresh, data-driven insights, leaders can make well-informed decisions when it comes to what areas of the business need more resources or optimized processes and which can be scaled for growth.

Making the most of the transformative potential of telehealth in 2023

The year ahead offers tremendous opportunity for innovation and growth in behavioral health, and telehealth can give organizations the adaptive digital foundation they need to build and scale business. Whether meeting the surging demand from patients whose expectations are being shaped by consumerization trends or responding to evolving payer policies and legislative regulations in the post-pandemic world, a secure and scalable telehealth platform can empower resource-constrained companies with a much broader range of capabilities. Scale delivery of high quality care that is accessible, convenient, and flexible. Expand offerings to include subscription programs that address client needs beyond the therapy room and maximize use of all resources. Increase efficiencies and improve quality by securely integrating with all the systems that run the business. Guide optimization of treatment and the business through data and insights. For behavioral health care companies, this is the year that telehealth can become truly transformative.

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