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If you are licensed in a subspecialty, there is a strong likelihood that someone is seeking your opinion.  You won’t be surprised to hear that some subspecialties like Oncology, Cardiology and Neurology are always in demand. But plenty of others, including: dentistry, Orthopedics, ENT’s OBGYNs and others, are also finding demand for their services. You may be under the impression that this is a difficult and costly service to begin offering, but that just simply is not the case.

The trend had already begun, but the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has kicked it into overdrive.

Subspecialists are adopting telemedicine technology to provide their expertise to patients they never even meet. Sound exotic? It’s not. The Washington Post projects over 1 billion telehealth visits by the end of 2020. Subspecialists are finding a growing opportunity to expand their domain to patients who otherwise might not have this specialization available to them.

Many hospitals that have relied solely on their brick and mortar facilities are now realizing that their physical location is only a part of the health care arsenal they can wield. While hospital facilities are valuable, rare and difficult to reproduce, they often limit their accessibility to those that are geographically local and sufficiently mobile to take advantage of an in-person visit. Beyond the physical structure, the most valuable asset that the hospital employs are its expert physicians. With the appropriate digital infrastructure, their expertise can be deployed well beyond the four walls of the facility.

In the post-COVID-19 world, most hospitals will be scrambling to reclaim the revenue they missed during the pandemic. Certainly, a good portion of normal operational revenue will revive as patients become more comfortable returning to the hospital for non-emergency conditions and delayed procedures. But making up for the losses arising during the pandemic will be a daunting task.

Second opinions are becoming an important component for patient healthcare. A recent study by the Mayo Clinic identified that as many as 88 percent of second opinions either differ to refine the original patient diagnosis [1]. This occurs more often than not when the physician rendering the second opinion has specialized expertise in the field in question and has the benefit of careful review of the patient’s prior complete set of clinical data.