A $247 billion opportunity

Going virtual could equate to a big shift in spending in healthcare services. Consumers continue to embrace virtual health, and with ongoing investment in innovation, we estimate that around $250 billion in outpatient spend could potentially be shifted to virtual settings for home health services, office visits, and urgent care.

Around 20 percent of all Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial outpatient, emergency-department, and home health spending could be virtually enabled.

Image description:

A large square tree map represents the total outpatient, emergency department and home health spending in the United States. The tree map is broken into two areas: the larger area is nonvirtualized healthcare at around $1 trillion, and the smaller area (and focus of the exhibit) is virtual healthcare at $247 billion. The $247 billion box is further broken into smaller boxes proportionate to their dollar value, representing virtual healthcare areas such as urgent care, virtual and near-virtual office visits, virtual home health visits and home medication administration spending.

An additional area examines each of these subsets of the $247 billion in spending. The percentages of outpatient, emergency department and home health subsets can be enabled as colored circles within larger 100% circles, and show that virtual home visits have the most immediate potential.

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To read the article, see “The next frontier of care delivery in healthcare,” March 24, 2022.