Telehealth start-ups hail a decade's worth of progress during COVID-19Start-ups that were gaining traction in virtual healthcare exploded in popularity during the lockdown. They are now looking to sustain growth as restrictions ease.
Coivu co-founder Dr Silvia Pfeiffer has seen the company's user numbers explode during lockdown. Louie Douvis
Yolanda RedrupReporter
Jun 9, 2020 – 12.00am
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It was the second week of March when co-founder of telehealth start-up Coviu, Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, realised she had better cancel her annual leave.
The chief executive of the healthcare videoconferencing platform had some long-planned time off booked in, but then the COVID-19 era kicked in and her fledgling company's growth started to catch fire.
It initially looked like its regular 10 per cent monthly growth rate would double, but as it turned out, she had no idea what she was in for.
Coviu co-founder Dr Silvia Pfeiffer has seen the company's user numbers explode during lockdown. Louie Douvis
"On March 13 the new Medicare items were announced and we all went into isolation and it made a big difference. On March 14 we had a 400 to 500 per cent increase in requests," Pfeiffer tells
The Australian Financial Review."Within a week we had a 10,000 per cent increase in traffic. We had been doing about 400 calls per day prior to COVID-19, but that leapt to more than 25,000.
"One of our investors described our growth as a [reverse] L curve, rather than a J curve. There's not many companies that get that kind of growth."
The business was
spun out of the CSIRO in 2018 and has backing from Main Sequence Ventures. Its videoconferencing platform is used by healthcare practices and integrates with the likes of practice management solution Halaxy and online medication delivery business Rosemary Health.
Prior to COVID-19 its online software-as-a-service platform had 300 to 400 medical practices signed up, but in three months that's jumped to 12,000.
Thanks to the hyper growth experienced by the start-up, Coviu has had to quadruple its team from 7 to more than 30 in that period.
Medicare Benefits Schedule statistics, remote consultations accounted for a quarter of all services claimed in March and April.
For general practitioners, telephone consultations were the most popular form of telehealth appointment, making up 96.4 per cent of the remote consultations, with more than 4.3 million claims in March and April. There were also 156,684 video and audio consultations. It's possible that some appointments were incorrectly labelled.
Halaxy's cloud platform is used by more than 45,000 practitioners globally, and its co-founder Alison Hardacre believes COVID-19 has kicked the whole healthcare sector onto a new digital path that would have otherwise taken years to eventuate.
"As a society and as an industry we've been talking about telehealth for 10-15 years, but it needed a big crisis to get us to a place of it being a big part of healthcare," she says,
"Online software like ours has flexibility to access it online or in the office and there will be a change to more online, cloud software.
"In the past three months we've had 3000 practitioners sign up, which is our usual growth rate, but they're using more telehealth features and a growth in administrative features that enable social distancing."
A long term change?While the boom in telehealth services during
COVID-19 has been undeniable, the industry still does not know if the expanded access to government subsidised telehealth appointments will continue after the pandemic.
In early May
Health Minister Greg Hunt indicated that he was lobbying for it to continue, but to date there has been no guarantees.At the time Hunt said 4.7 million people had received 7.7 million telehealth services since March 13.
A survey by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and the Australian Medical Association of close to 1300 GPs found 99 per cent were offering telehealth consultations.
Like Coviu, healthcare payments start-up Medipass has experienced previously unfathomable growth in the last few months.
The company, which supports digital health payments with patients, as well as claims with Medicare and electronic health claims system HICAPS, had a 380 per cent increase in new account sign-ups in the first week of April, compared to the first week of March.
Prior to COVID-19, the business had been growing at 22 per cent month-on-month.
The business now has more than 14,000 customers and 30 per cent of its customers increased their claims during COVID-19.
Co-founder Pete Williams says the industry has leapt forward five to 10 years in terms of its capacity to offer remote consultations.
He says the sector was evolving to be able to support consultations in all settings and similarly the payments technology would evolve with it.
"You'll be able to do a validation of a claim at the time of booking and it can be processed by the end of the session, be that in person or remote. You'll also have more options around instalment-based payments," he says.
RELATEDHow COVID-19 pushed the digital transformation agenda ahead"Buy now pay later has been starting, but it's been limited to dentistry, optometry and cosmetic procedures so far. We're seeing a larger demand from medical practices to be able to offer their own instalment programs for smaller amounts.
"We have about 10 per cent of active healthcare providers in Australia signed up and we hope to double that by the end of the year."
The next step for the industry, according to Pfeiffer, is the development and rollout of digitally connected clinical tools for citizens to use in their homes as part of consultations.
Her company is already in clinical trials for a tool for physiotherapists to be able to measure the progress of patients' range of motion, that today would need to be treated in a clinic. Pfeiffer hopes to bring it to market next year.
She is also keen to partner with third parties developing similar technologies.
"I absolutely believe that in the future we will all have a little kit that has a suite of standard medical devices – a stethoscope, something that can shine a light into the back of your throat – it's the clinical tools that will be the next wave of development," Pfeiffer says.
