Telehealth Marketing

Telehealth technology has been evolving for almost a century, but bringing its benefits to America’s 54 million stressed and medically underserved family caregivers remains a very big marketing problem.

An early attempt at providing telehealth care was proposed by Hugo Gernsback during 1925. Mr. Gernsback called his  system the “teledactyl.” In theory, the teledactyl would allow doctors to not only see their patients through a television screen . . . but also “touch them” from a distance.

The technology Mr. Gernsback envisioned eventually came to fruition and initiated a new era of telemedicine and telehealth innovation. Today increasingly robust telehealth processes offer patients a wide variety of convenient and affordable healthcare, and they provide clinicians with an easy way to implement virtual visits. But, there is one very big problem.

The problem is that very few patients (including America’s 54 million family caregivers) are engaging in telehealth services. In fact, even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, an AARP study found that only 4% of family caregivers had participated in an online visit with a healthcare provider. There is clearly a very big marketing problem.