Integrating AI and Telehealth: Asynchronous Electronic Visits (eVisits)

Health systems face growing patient demand alongside a limited supply of health care providers, straining their capacity to deliver timely primary and specialty care. eVisits can improve patient access by enabling patients to submit clinical concerns 24/7, which providers can then review and respond to asynchronously. This approach reduces reliance on scheduled synchronous telehealth or in-person visits, giving patients greater flexibility and enabling more efficient care delivery.

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into eVisits can strengthen this potential by addressing operational and structural barriers to adoption, including:

• Patient accessibility challenges that can limit adoption or result in incomplete submissions. AI-integrated patient portals can guide patients through intake, prompt them for missing information, and route them to appropriate follow-up, while AI-supported provider tools can help draft accessible patient-facing communications.
• Patient safety concerns when patients self-triage during eVisit requests. AI integration can ease provider concerns about allowing patients to self-triage, especially those with higher acuity conditions, by structuring intake and directing patients to the right level of care.
• Clinician administrative burden. AI integration can reduce incomplete questionnaires and summarize relevant clinical history, reducing the time clinicians spend gathering patient information and reviewing records.

This was developed by Manatt Health and the Telehealth Centers of Excellence at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) as part of a collaboration to identify and describe opportunities to integrate AI within telehealth programs to support broader telehealth scaling and adoption. This brief is part of a series of four briefs, each focused on a different telehealth use case and based on background research and expert interviews with health system and telehealth vendor leaders. See previous briefs on the integration of AI into , and .

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Bhargava R, Gayre G, Huang J, Sievers E, Reed M. Patient e-Visit Use and Outcomes for Common Symptoms in an Integrated Health Care Delivery System. JAMA Netw Open. 2021;4(3):e212174. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.2174