Camille Baxter:
Hello, and welcome to Healthcare Insider, a sponsored content podcast series From Modern Healthcare Custom Media. I'm your host, Camille Baxter. And today we are excited to be speaking with Stephany Verstraete, Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer of Teladoc Health. Stephany leads Teladoc Health's global marketing and communications efforts driving the growth of member adoption and utilization through best-in-class channel engagement strategies and consumer relationship management. She is also responsible for the market positioning and growing the product portfolio. Today, we are talking to Stephany about a crucial topic on many healthcare leaders' minds today: health equity. Before we dive in, we'd like to thank the sponsor of this episode, Teladoc. Teladoc Health is the global leader in whole person virtual care, offering the technology to connect, expertise you can trust and the power to improve health for all. Stephany, thank you so much for being here today. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
Stephany Verstraete:
Thank you, Camille. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and equally I'm very much looking forward to the conversation.
Camille Baxter:
Well, great. Let's start off talking a little bit about you, your role at Teladoc and what energizes you about that role.
Stephany Verstraete:
I often say I have, what I think, is probably the best job going. I've spent my career really building consumer brands and driving consumer behavior change and it's been an extraordinarily rewarding opportunity over the past six and a half years to apply that experience to Teladoc's mission and really see the impact that we are having for people globally, which is exciting to me personally.
Camille Baxter:
So let's jump into the questions about Teladoc and learn a little bit more. The promise of virtual care is that it can help improve access to healthcare for low income, vulnerable and rural populations. How is Teladoc Health seeing that promise play out for their customers?
Stephany Verstraete:
Yeah. At Teladoc, we see it as an opportunity and a responsibility to help expand equitable access to care and address persistent health disparities. It's something that we've long invested in, in part because it's core to our mission and equally importantly though, because it is as the Institute of Medicine defines equity, it's an integral component of delivering medical quality. I think that integral is really the key word because philosophically we believe that to have the greatest impact for the greatest number of people across the greatest number of healthcare needs, we need to make equity a foundation across all of our services. And what that looks like today in practice is that more than 80% of the population can benefit from one or more of our services.
And I think I talked about that kind of that rewarding impact piece. Our data shows that we're filling a real need. We see that 25% of our primary 360 members with diabetes are actually newly diagnosed, and I think for us, that's really exciting. We also know that social determinants of health are top of mind for everyone today and a great example of how virtual care can be that great equalizer when it comes to health equity is the role that video visits can play in giving care providers or coaches visual clues about an individual's physical environment. And those clues can provide important insights into social or community factors that may impact and influence a person's health journey, an individual's health journey. And then maybe lastly, I would say looking beyond our own commercial efforts, we recognize the toll that mental health issues have taken on underserved communities and through our better health brand, we've provided more than 65 million dollars in financial aid to enable therapy for low income individuals.
Camille Baxter:
Wow. It really is a game changer in healthcare. So let's talk a little bit about video visits. A video visit may still be hard for some people, such as those who don't have access to a smartphone or computer or dependable wifi. What is Teladoc Health doing to address this reality?
Stephany Verstraete:
Yeah. Fundamentally our services are designed to reduce barriers to care and we're continually evolving them to support a range of those unique whole person care needs and meeting people really where they're at. And we make these investments in trainings and accommodations to meet people living in underserved communities. So for example, we currently offer landline access for people who may have visual impairment or for communities that do lack internet connectivity, as you mentioned. We're also expanding that access to care with cellular remote monitoring and now through our voice enabled devices like with our partnership with Alexa.
In fact, we actually see that more than half, about 55%, of our members who are participating in our chronic condition management programs actually live in underserved communities. I think one of my favorite things is a story from a member, a working mom of three who lives in a small town, rural Kentucky, and she has access to our diabetes management service and most of the services that she has are actually more than an hour away. She was telling us a story about how she was in the car with her children and her blood sugar got critically low and basically before she even realized it, she had a notification from a coach, a coach had contacted her to guide her through how she could resolve the issue. It's a great example of how the integration of data and the connectivity were really able to seamlessly reach her in that moment of need.
Camille Baxter:
Yeah. That convenience factor of virtual care really helped support people that might not manage their chronic conditions as effectively like you said if they have to drive a long distance to go see their physicians. So let's talk about cultural competency. Cultural competency is another element of ensuring care is provided equitably and accessibly. In what ways does Teladoc Health provide culturally competent support to its customers?
Stephany Verstraete:
Yeah. As an organization, we are focused on our abilities to provide the highest quality language, linguistically appropriate and culturally aware care to help improve healthcare experiences and the health outcomes of those that we have the privilege of being able to serve. And I think an interesting example, last year, our clinical analytics team identified a gap in our experience for Hispanic members as affecting our health outcome results. So earlier this year, we launched our chronic condition management programs in Spanish from the web and app experience all the way through to the engagement collateral and that builds, in addition to us having more than a hundred mental healthcare providers and coaches who identify as Spanish speaking. So really bringing that experience, translating it, literally translating it, but also culturally match the population's needs.
We also recognize the importance and at the same time, the challenges for any healthcare delivery organization when it comes to provider capacity of trying to treat all of the populations at scale. Today, we do this through a mix of staffing diversity, multi-state licensure and extensive training and matching technology. And all of our physicians, for example, complete training on caring for individuals who identify as LGBTQ. Our approach to date has really been to prioritize having a provider composition that equips us to meet the care needs of members with whom we have a longitudinal relationship. So, that might be our chronic condition programs, it might be our P360 experience or our mental healthcare programs.
As I mentioned earlier we're continuously investing to evolve in our experiences so that they can better meet the unique health needs of individuals. And this year, a key component of our efforts is to expand members' ability to self-report regal data in the Teladoc experience. So that would be race, ethnicity, gender, age, and language, as well as pronouns to, again, go back to that ability to make sure that their healthcare experience is really culturally reflective of the care that they need.
Camille Baxter:
Going further down that path of health equity, can you talk about what Teladoc has learned in its journey as it relates to health equity and has that approach changed in recent years based on learnings?
Stephany Verstraete:
Yeah. I've had the privilege of observing consumer behavior change, like I said, now for six years and we've seen more change in our industry and in our organization in the last two years than at any other time in the company's history. There's no doubt, a lot of conversation about the acceleration of individuals who are open to virtual care and I think we're seeing that around the globe. Our research shows that not only has the general consumer's likelihood to use virtual care remained high and actually higher as we exited last year than it was in 2020 even, we're seeing this actually be true for people of color specifically. We're also seeing adoption spill real gaps for new population. So we see it in our Medicare advantage population, for example, where 42% of our Medicare advantage members who have visits say that otherwise they would not have sought care.
We're also hearing and seeing client expectations of us on this topic come to the fore. They're coming to us, it's an arena where they're expecting us to help them achieve their priorities and their DENI goals. And so as an organization, in addition to our commitment to deliver care for all people, we're working to build an organization that represents the communities we serve, whether that is the more than 1400 colleagues who actively participate in one of our seven business resource groups, or we have a dedicated head of workforce DENI and chief health equity officer roles who are really actively and dedicated to helping advance our strategy both internally as an organization, as well as informing how our care is delivered. And then we have an employee led health equity task force that got oversight from our CEO, from our chief medical officer and our board of directors.
So just all the way around, the mission really fuels passionate employees and in a commitment that we, top to bottom, are making as an organization. I think maybe the last thing I would point out here is we're also deploying virtual care and seeing it increasingly deployed as an essential way to address physician and nursing shortages. We're hearing about that within the hospital and health systems are continuing to face that. And several of our hospital and health system clients are leveraging healthcare technology to improve access to specialists, really enabling patients to remain within their local community rather than having to be transported to a metropolitan hub if they live in a healthcare desert, for example.
Camille Baxter:
There's so many applications that really expand who the clinicians can touch and impact and how patients can get care in a way that works for their lives. From a regulatory perspective, how should virtual care policies and regulations change to ensure access to virtual care is equal for everyone?
Stephany Verstraete:
This is an arena in which we have a long history in advocating for key health equity issues, both at the state and at the federal level. We work with policy makers to address persistent disparities in connectivity, whether access to technology and digital literacy and advancing innovative solutions to expand that access to care. An example of this is we're a founding partner of Telehealth Access for America to ensure that barriers to access that were lowered during the pandemic continue while at the same time ensuring that other safety measures like HIPAA and the restrictions on prescribing of controlled substances come back. So really striking that balance.
We talked a lot about change and the change that the pandemic has brought on. I think for us, our mission remains the same, to empower all people everywhere to live their healthiest lives by transforming the healthcare experience. Our commitment to health equity is rooted in this mission and it shows up in the people we hire and with whom we work, the products and experiences that we create, the quality of the healthcare that we deliver and the investments that we make to improve that access to healthcare. So I think in some, I think we're really excited that together we're working to accelerate a future in which all people are seen, heard, and understand relative to their healthcare needs.
Camille Baxter:
Thank you, Stephany, for your time today, and for helping us navigate health equity in remote delivery of care. And I love the stories you shared.
Stephany Verstraete:
Thank you, Camille. I've enjoyed the conversation tremendously.
Camille Baxter:
This has been a sponsored episode of Healthcare Insider created in collaboration with Teladoc Health. For more information about Teladoc, visit teladochealth.com. I'm your host, Camille Baxter. Look for more episodes of Healthcare Insider at modernhealthcare.com/podcast, or subscribe at Apple podcasts or your preferred podcaster. Thanks for listening.
