Beyond the Video Visit: What Healthcare Learned From Telehealth’s First Great Expansion

When the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated virtual care adoption almost overnight, healthcare organizations did what they had to do: keep patients connected while protecting them from unnecessary exposure. Video platforms were deployed in weeks instead of years, regulations temporarily relaxed and health systems invested billions of dollars building digital front doors that could sustain care during an unprecedented crisis.

Five years later, the conversation has changed. Rather than asking how quickly healthcare can deploy telehealth, leaders are asking whether those investments produced sustainable improvements in patient outcomes, clinician experience and operational performance.

Members of the Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank, a curated community of executives and innovators spanning patient experience, healthcare technology, AI, policy, workforce strategy and care delivery, believe the industry’s next chapter depends less on expanding virtual visits and more on redesigning how care is delivered. Below, they discuss where they think the industry overinvested and underinvested in telehealth, and what they’d do differently if they had the opportunity to build it again from scratch.

Technology Doesn’t Create Trust—People Do

Few healthcare sectors experienced telehealth’s rapid expansion more directly than home health providers. Aaron Marcum, Visionary and Managing Partner of Riverside Home Care, says the industry’s biggest mistake wasn’t adopting technology too quickly—it was assuming technology alone would improve care.

“We overinvested in technology and underinvested in culture,” Marcum says. “Telehealth expanded access, but technology alone doesn’t create trust, engagement or better care.”

Rather than focusing exclusively on software platforms and virtual capabilities, Marcum believes healthcare organizations should have devoted equal attention to leadership development, communication training and organizational change management.

“Technology scales processes. Great cultures scale people,” he says.

For Marcum, digital transformation is ultimately a people transformation.

“Technology made healthcare more convenient, but not necessarily more connected or more personal.”

– Feri Naseh, Founder and CEO of MeTime Healing LLC

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The Future of Telehealth Is Human-Centered Care

While telehealth dramatically improved convenience, Feri Naseh, Founder and CEO of MeTime Healing LLC, believes healthcare often confused convenience with genuine patient-centered care.

“Telehealth became the lifeline that kept care accessible during an unprecedented crisis,” Naseh says. “The speed of adoption was remarkable.”

Yet she argues that healthcare organizations concentrated primarily on digitizing appointments instead of redesigning the patient experience.

“Technology made healthcare more convenient, but not necessarily more connected or more personal,” she says.

According to Naseh, the industry’s greatest oversight was treating telehealth as a technology initiative instead of a human-centered transformation.

“Patients struggled with language barriers, cultural differences, digital literacy, emotional challenges and navigating increasingly complex healthcare systems,” she says.

Looking ahead, Naseh believes competitive advantage will come from combining advanced technologies with a deeper understanding of human behavior.

“The next chapter of digital healthcare will not be defined by who has the best telehealth platform,” she says, “but by organizations that combine AI, behavioral science and cultural intelligence to support patients beyond the virtual visit.”

“The industry underinvested in many things. The question worth asking is where the burden went instead.”

– Donna P. Mitchell, CEO of Mitchell Universal Network LLC

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Every Technology Has an Invisible Workforce

Donna P. Mitchell, CEO of Mitchell Universal Network LLC, and widely known as The Transformation Authority™, says telehealth exposed a fundamental flaw in how organizations evaluate digital transformation.

“The industry underinvested in many things. The question worth asking is where the burden went instead,” Mitchell says. “It went to people no one counted.”

As telehealth expanded, she explains, schedulers and medical assistants quietly became front-line technical support.

“Schedulers and medical assistants became the technical support desk, walking patients through failed connections before visits already booked back to back,” Mitchell says. “That work was never budgeted, never staffed and never appeared in a single telehealth metric.”

Healthcare leaders carefully measured appointment volume and access statistics, she notes, but rarely quantified the operational burden placed on front-line staff.

“Access was measured,” she says. “Absorption was not.”

If given another opportunity, Mitchell says every implementation should begin with a key step.

“I would name the absorber before funding the platform,” she says. “Someone carries the cost of any change. When no one is assigned, it falls to whoever sits closest and is least able to refuse.”

Her final observation may be the most memorable lesson of all.

“Adoption follows whoever absorbs the burden of changing,” Mitchell says. “Telehealth handed it to the people with the least standing to say no.”

Integration Matters More Than Apps

As healthcare organizations increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence into virtual care, Jordan Henry, Founder and Chief AI Ethicist of Veritas AI Consulting, believes the industry’s biggest mistake was treating telehealth as a standalone digital service instead of embedding it into the broader care ecosystem.

“The industry overinvested in rapid platform scaling and consumer-facing apps while underinvesting in clinical integration, interoperability and sustainable reimbursement models,” Henry says. “Many overlooked digital equity, cybersecurity and provider workflow redesign, leading to fragmented care and burnout.”

Rather than focusing on adding more virtual touchpoints, Henry argues organizations should first strengthen the infrastructure supporting those interactions.

“If starting over today, I’d prioritize deep EHR integration and care coordination over standalone apps,” he says. “I’d also invest in hybrid care models that blend virtual and in-person services, digital literacy and broadband access for underserved populations and robust governance frameworks for AI-enabled triage and documentation.”

Henry believes healthcare’s long-term success will depend on measuring the right outcomes rather than simply increasing telehealth utilization.

“Telehealth’s long-term value depends not on visit volume but on care continuity, equity and operational sustainability,” he says, “especially as AI reshapes triage, documentation and population health.”

The Future of Telehealth Is the Home

For organizations serving patients with serious illness, telehealth has always represented only one piece of a much larger care model. James Dismond, CEO of MiraSol Health, a nonprofit hospice, palliative and grief care organization, believes the industry’s biggest lesson is that healthcare focused too much on virtual visits and not enough on supporting patients where they most want to receive care: at home.

“I’d argue we learned the wrong lesson from telehealth,” Dismond says. “We invested heavily in virtual visits when we should have been investing in making the home the center of care.”

Leading an organization that has spent more than four decades helping patients remain safely at home, Dismond says technology delivers its greatest value when it strengthens care coordination instead of replacing it.

“What keeps patients safely at home isn’t another video appointment,” he says. “It’s exceptional care coordination, early intervention and supporting family caregivers before a crisis occurs.”

If healthcare leaders were redesigning telehealth today, Dismond believes every investment should be evaluated against one strategic objective.

“Every technology investment would be measured by one question,” he says. “Does it help patients remain safely at home with the right care at the right time? That’s where the future of home-based care will be won.”

Build Telehealth Into the Care Journey

Tirumala Ashish Kumar Manne, Principal Cloud Architect at Optum, spends his career designing secure, interoperable and AI-enabled healthcare systems. Looking back at telehealth’s rapid expansion, he believes healthcare organizations often invested in isolated digital tools instead of creating integrated care experiences.

“The industry overinvested in standalone video visits and point solutions while underinvesting in interoperability, workflow redesign, identity, consent and sustained engagement,” Manne says. “The result was fragmented data, duplicate work for clinicians and virtual care disconnected from the patient journey.”

Instead of viewing telehealth as a separate service line, Manne recommends treating it as one component of a unified hybrid care model supported by shared infrastructure.

“I would anchor it on FHIR-based APIs, a shared longitudinal record, identity and consent services and patient-directed data exchange aligned with CMS interoperability priorities,” he says.

He also argues that many operational functions should disappear into existing clinical workflows rather than becoming separate administrative tasks.

“Scheduling, reimbursement and prior authorization belong inside clinical workflows, not bolted on.”

Ultimately, Manne believes healthcare organizations should stop measuring telehealth primarily through utilization metrics.

“I would measure success by access, continuity, clinician burden, equity and outcomes rather than visit volume.”

For Manne, success is increasingly defined by how well technology disappears into care delivery rather than how prominently it stands apart.

Lasting Care Requires Lasting Habits

For Dorothy Riviere, Founder and CEO of Work Resilience, telehealth’s biggest accomplishment—making care easier to reach—also exposed its greatest limitation. Expanding access is only the first step. Improving health requires changing behavior over time.

“Telehealth overinvested in access, or getting care onto a screen,” Riviere says. “It underinvested in workflow, for patients and caregivers both.”

Riviere believes the missing ingredient was behavioral science.

“A video visit is still just a visit,” she says. “It does not build the habit loop that actually changes health outcomes—a cue, a routine, a reward, repeated until it sticks.”

If healthcare leaders were redesigning telehealth today, Riviere would build those behavioral principles directly into digital platforms.

“We solved distance and left adoption to chance,” she says.

Instead, she recommends a more intentional design philosophy.

“Build the cue and the follow through into the platform itself, not as an add-on after access was solved.”

“Real healthcare value comes from appropriate care, continuity and outcomes.”

– Harikrishnan Muthukrishnan, Principal IT Developer at BCBS Florida

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Telehealth Needs Intelligent Clinical Triage

Harikrishnan Muthukrishnan, Principal IT Developer at BCBS Florida, believes the industry’s biggest misstep was equating telehealth growth with healthcare progress.

“Looking back, the industry overinvested in making virtual visits available and underinvested in deciding when virtual care was the right setting,” Muthukrishnan says.

During the pandemic, healthcare organizations understandably focused on expanding access as quickly as possible. But once virtual care became widely available, he argues the industry should have shifted its attention toward ensuring patients received the right type of care at the right time.

“We measured success by visit volume,” he says. “Real healthcare value comes from appropriate care, continuity and outcomes.”

Rather than treating every encounter as either virtual or in person, Muthukrishnan advocates for intelligent triage models that guide patients toward the most appropriate level of care.

“If we were starting over today, I would build telehealth around intelligent triage,” he says. “What can be virtual, what needs in-person care, what can be asynchronous and what must be escalated.”

He also believes telehealth should become inseparable from broader clinical management rather than operating as an isolated service.

“I would connect telehealth to care plans, chronic condition follow-up, medication adherence, behavioral health and post-discharge monitoring,” he says.

The lesson, Muthukrishnan says, is that telehealth is more than a technology rollout.

“It’s a care delivery model. It needs staffing, governance, quality measures and clear workflows to scale safely.”

Continuous Care Beats Digital Replication

For Mahendran Chinnaiah, Digital Healthcare Architect at a major U.S. healthcare and pharmacy services firm, the industry’s biggest mistake was recreating the traditional office visit online instead of reimagining how care could be delivered continuously.

“Five years ago, healthcare overinvested in standalone video visit platforms,” Chinnaiah says. “We treated telehealth as a disconnected, digitized version of an office visit rather than a fully integrated care model.”

That approach, he explains, created isolated technologies that generated additional work for clinicians without improving care coordination.

“We overinvested in isolated video tools that created data silos outside core EHR workflows,” he says. “We underinvested in interoperability, remote patient monitoring and continuous chronic care infrastructure.”

Perhaps most significantly, he believes healthcare underestimated telehealth’s effect on clinicians.

“We overlooked clinician burnout and administrative overload,” Chinnaiah says. “We digitized the visit but doubled the paperwork.”

If given the opportunity to redesign telehealth today, Chinnaiah would focus on building intelligent hybrid systems that continuously monitor patients instead of simply scheduling virtual appointments.

“The strategy shifts from ‘virtual appointments’ to intelligent, continuous care,” he says. “The goal isn’t just streaming video. It’s building hybrid systems backed by ambient documentation and real-time remote data to catch health issues before they become acute crises.”

Think Data Foundations Over Digital Front Doors

As healthcare organizations prepare for an AI-enabled future, Sriharsha Chavali, Enterprise Technology Leader at The Aspen Group, believes telehealth’s next evolution depends less on better video platforms and more on stronger data foundations.

“The rapid expansion of telehealth five years ago preserved access and accelerated digital transformation,” Chavali says. “In hindsight, the industry overinvested in virtual visit tools while underinvesting in the data, AI and operational foundations needed for lasting change.”

Drawing on his experience designing enterprise-scale healthcare platforms built around HL7, FHIR and AI-enabled systems, Chavali argues that many organizations mistakenly viewed telehealth as its own delivery channel.

“Telehealth was often treated as a standalone channel,” he says. “Organizations invested heavily in video and scheduling but placed limited focus on interoperable data, real-time analytics, workflow integration and clinician experience.”

The result was fragmented information that limited healthcare’s readiness for emerging AI technologies.

“Fragmented data and weak governance further constrained readiness for generative AI.”

Instead of investing primarily in digital front ends, Chavali recommends strengthening the infrastructure that powers them.

“A better approach prioritizes an intelligent ecosystem,” he says. “Cloud-native data, strong governance, AI-ready architecture and workflow-native solutions.”

Ultimately, he believes technology investments should be evaluated by their impact on clinicians and patients rather than their novelty.

“Sustainable innovation depends on connected data, clinician empowerment, trust and measurable outcomes.”

The Blueprint for Telehealth Success

• Invest in culture with the same intensity as technology. Leadership development, communication and change management determine whether digital transformation succeeds after implementation.
• Design every digital experience around people, not platforms. Convenience alone does not create meaningful patient engagement, especially across diverse populations with varying cultural, language and digital literacy needs.
• Identify who absorbs organizational change. Successful tech adoption depends on recognizing and supporting the front-line employees who carry implementation burdens that often go unmeasured.
• Build interoperability before expanding digital services. Prioritize integrated clinical workflows, digital equity and governance over additional standalone applications.
• Measure technology by its ability to keep patients safely at home. Evaluate every innovation according to whether it strengthens coordinated, home-based care.
• Treat telehealth as one component of hybrid care. Embed virtual care directly into clinical workflows through interoperable infrastructure rather than operating separate digital systems.
• Incorporate behavioral science into digital health design. Long-term patient engagement requires habit formation, consistent follow-through and workflow design—not simply improved access.
• Use intelligent triage instead of defaulting to virtual visits. Match patients with the most appropriate care setting based on clinical need rather than technology availability.
• Shift from virtual appointments to continuous care. Combine remote monitoring, ambient AI and connected data to support proactive intervention.
• Build AI-ready data foundations before pursuing advanced automation. Sustainable innovation depends on interoperable data, governance, clinician trust and measurable outcomes rather than isolated digital tools.

From Emergency Response to Enduring Strategy

Five years after telehealth’s rapid expansion, healthcare leaders largely agree that virtual care succeeded in preserving access during an unprecedented crisis. Yet the industry’s greatest lessons have less to do with video technology than with the systems surrounding it: Culture matters as much as software, interoperability matters more than standalone platforms and lasting success depends on integrating technology into clinical workflows rather than layering it on top of them.

As healthcare enters its next phase of digital transformation—powered by AI, hybrid care models and increasingly sophisticated data ecosystems—organizations must measure success not by the number of virtual visits they deliver, but by the continuity, equity, efficiency and outcomes they enable. Telehealth’s first chapter was about speed. Its next chapter will be about building healthcare systems that are more connected, more human and more resilient.