From patients to clinicians to entire health systems, the value of telemedicine is clear. It puts specialty expertise within reach of more hospitals and augments needed clinical capacity to care for more patients — without requiring those patients, or clinicians, to leave their home communities.
This year’s Telehealth Awareness Week, led by the American Telemedicine Association, spotlights just how vital virtual care has become. Our history as a company, pioneering acute specialty telemedicine for over two decades, – providing over 1 million patient encounters annually across 2,600 active specialty telemedicine programs – has shown the power of telemedicine every day.
“Telemedicine isn’t a temporary fix. It’s a long-term, sustainable strategy for expanding access, solving staffing challenges, and empowering hospitals to keep services in their communities,” said Access TeleCare CEO Joshua DeTillio. “By integrating telemedicine into the core of hospital operations, we’re helping our partners move beyond filling gaps in coverage to deploying sustainable, high-quality multi-specialty care service lines.”
Expanding Access, Strengthening Communities
Implementing telemedicine often starts with one urgent need — a neurologist for stroke coverage, a psychiatrist for crisis stabilization, or an intensivist to support the ICU. But the results are transformative. Once hospitals experience how telemedicine boosts capacity, strengthens community trust, and supports their clinical teams, they expand into additional service lines.
It’s a ripple effect: more access, more services, more reliability >>> improved financials.
Driving Outcomes and Impact
Telemedicine delivers measurable benefits for hospitals and patients alike:
- Faster treatment in time-sensitive emergencies like strokes and behavioral health crises.
- Reduced transfers so patients stay closer to home and hospitals build patient loyalty.
- Expanded specialty services for communities that would otherwise go without.
- Clinician support that relieves workforce strain and reduces burnout.
These outcomes aren’t just statistics — they’re lives saved, services preserved, and communities sustained.
Telehealth. Is. Health.
The message of Telehealth Awareness Week is simple, and it’s one Access TeleCare has championed for years: Telehealth. Is. Health.
This year, we are calling on our policy partners in Washington, D.C. to take up this message as well and make permanent the Medicare telehealth flexibilities first advanced during the pandemic on a temporary basis. It is long past time for these flexibilities to be permanent healthcare policy, and there’s no more fitting way to celebrate Telehealth Awareness Week than by passing federal legislation to eliminate any uncertainty about the value of virtual healthcare to support millions of Americans in accessing needed care safely, conveniently, and affordably.
Telemedicine is not an alternative to healthcare — it is healthcare. It’s the way forward for hospitals under pressure, patients in need, and clinicians working to deliver the best care possible.
