Part 1 of a 2-part blog series On September 15th, The Nashville Entrepreneur Center hosted the first round of two virtual sessions for the 2022 Telehealth Academy. I had the honor of kicking off the event, during which I pointed out four distinct trends in the industry. Here’s a summary of some of thoughts I shared. These past few years have seen a flurry of activity around virtual care and I’m excited to see how it’s changed the broader healthcare industry. As you may know, eVisit had already been in business for about six years before the pandemic struck, so let me start by talking a bit about our origins. Prior to founding eVisit, I had spent some time at some large, highly competitive telemedicine companies. That’s where I recognized the need for a virtual care platform built for—not compete against—large enterprise health systems that were trying to drive their own virtual care strategy using their own physicians. Fast forward to the pandemic. During this difficult time, we all saw a massive adoption of tech-enabled health care—things that were probably on everyone’s five-year roadmap before the pandemic, but which quickly became a priority in March 2020. Some organizations were further along in their adoption of telehealth, but I think as things started to play out, the industry became fond of saying things like, “This has changed healthcare forever.” That’s a bold claim, but for me the most notable development was actually the acceleration of the consumerization of care. It just so happened that many elements of this consumerization—convenience, cost, safety, patient experience, and more—happened to be associated with telemedicine. And that’s why I’m so excited that eVisit is sponsoring this year’s Telehealth Academy. Here we have an opportunity to bring together some of the greatest thought leaders in the country on this topic to work through the challenges that we've seen occurring with so many healthcare organizations. It was incredibly inspiring to see...