Forum 2025 Insights: access more keynotes, articles, and expert discussions from our annual event.
By Ethan Berke, MD, MPH, Chief Medical Officer & SVP, Integrated Care, Teladoc Health
Session: Teladoc Health is ready to lead into the new era of virtual care
In my 30 years of experience as a family physician, having a trusted and consistent relationship with my patients was crucial to their long-term health and quality of life. Seeing the positive impact of these relationships on my patients, and their families and communities, made me realize we could greatly improve broader population health by making this high-value care more commonplace.
Like many physicians who transition to a healthcare executive role, my desire was to make a greater impact on our healthcare system beyond my immediate community. I wanted to scale my experiences and knowledge to help more people. It's that passion for transforming healthcare delivery that brought me to Teladoc Health. This organization has pioneered virtual care from the very beginning and is now at the forefront of advancing virtual care to further transform the delivery of quality healthcare into a frictionless, value-driven experience. As our CEO, Chuck Divita, shared at our Forum event, virtual care has the power to do much more as a catalyst for better health. We’ve moved on from the “access era” of virtual care to the “orchestration era,” where we integrate care across physical and mental health with long-term provider relationships.
In my role as Chief Medical Officer, I’m responsible for ensuring we continue to deliver the highest quality care, provide access for more people and create more personalized experiences as we enter this new era of care orchestration and delivery. This next level of virtual care is something Teladoc Health is uniquely positioned to lead. Only we have the technology and clinical capabilities to deliver and coordinate care across patients and care providers, platforms and partners, whether virtually or in the community.
Here are just a few ways we’re actively working towards realizing our vision.
Primary care is incredibly important to me. Good things happen when people have primary care. Unfortunately, too many people lack access in their community.
With Primary360, Teladoc Health serves as a nationwide longitudinal primary care provider that drives great results. This makes primary care more accessible and creates opportunities to identify chronic conditions earlier, so we can engage patients and help avoid costly emergency department visits. Our clinical outcomes and the now permanent provisions that allow first-dollar coverage of virtual care in high-deductible health plans have more plan sponsors adopting virtual primary care.
More than 100 million people have access to Teladoc Health’s high-quality services for their urgent care needs. That’s a powerful opportunity to resolve their immediate concerns and use our clinical data and expertise to address a wider range of patient needs and drive better health outcomes.
Recent enhancements to our proprietary technology allow our providers to have a unified view of the patient that enables them to deliver the highest quality comprehensive care.
Our providers are empowered to proactively guide patients to care—whether that be virtual or in-person. Providers can test and treat a broad range of episodic care needs, address gaps in care, such as missed screenings, and send virtual checkup kits directly to a person’s home.
Given the prevalence and costs associated with chronic conditions, we’re continuing to invest in cardiometabolic healthcare. Our new Cardiometabolic Health Program addresses patients’ healthy lifestyle behaviors to get to the root of chronic conditions. This focus on the root cause is coupled with clinical interventions from an array of care providers and delivered efficiently, and with high impact, thanks to risk stratification.
With a combination of self-guided resources, clinical care, monitoring devices and coaching, we’re helping people achieve sustainable results. In a Teladoc Health study of more than 200,000 members living with diabetes with an A1c of 7% or higher, 58% achieved remission-level A1c after engaging with the program for 6 months. For members who entered the program with very high A1c levels (9% or higher), the average A1c reduction was nearly three points.
Upcoming innovations will help us make an even greater impact. For instance, enhanced risk stratification capabilities allow us to deliver the right health interventions for maximum impact. We plan to expand our care teams to include specialists, such as endocrinologists and pharmacists, for patients who would benefit from those services. In these cases, we will coordinate care with the patient’s primary care provider or, if they do not have a primary care relationship, we can make a referral to an in-network community provider or Teladoc Health’s Primary360 program.
This is an exciting time for virtual care. I’m looking forward to the impact we will create together that will remove unnecessary complexity, provide quality care and support patients in a way that enables healthcare to work for them.
