In 2019, telehealth visits in the United States numbered approximately 840,000. In 2020, they numbered 52 million. That is not a trend — it is a market transformation compressed into a single year by a once-in-a-generation shock that forced healthcare to adopt a technology it had debated for two decades in a matter of weeks.
The pandemic peak has settled. Telehealth visits stabilized at roughly 25 million annually by 2022 and have remained there since. What has not receded is the permanent shift in patient expectations about how and where care is delivered — and the corresponding permanent shift in the clinical operations infrastructure healthcare organizations need to manage a patient population that now expects hybrid access as a baseline, not an exception.
The clinical technology market serving that hybrid model is still being built. And the administrators driving its purchasing decisions have job titles most physician mailing lists and healthcare email lists were not built to find.
Why hybrid care is more complex than telehealth
Hybrid care is not simply telehealth added onto an existing in-person practice. It requires different scheduling systems, different patient communication workflows, different documentation processes, and different clinical protocols for determining which patients and situations warrant virtual versus in-person evaluation. A practice running hybrid care well — where the transition between modalities is seamless for the patient and invisible in the EHR — has made operational investments in integration and workflow design that go far beyond purchasing a telehealth platform.
The technology purchasing this generates spans a wider set of categories than the initial adoption wave: asynchronous care platforms that handle structured intake without requiring a synchronous visit, remote patient monitoring integration that makes wearable and home monitoring data actionable in clinical workflow rather than stored in a silo, and digital front door technology that unifies scheduling, intake, and care navigation regardless of modality.
The buyer most lists are missing: Director of Digital Health
The purchase conversations for hybrid care technology are not being driven by the contacts that drove the 2020 emergency telehealth deployments — those were largely CMO and IT decisions made under urgency that bypassed normal evaluation. The deliberate, strategic investments of 2025 and 2026 are evaluated by a new contact tier.
Directors of Digital Health and Virtual Care. Responsible for the clinical and operational strategy of an organization’s virtual care offering: which platforms serve which patient populations, how virtual visits integrate with in-person episodes, what remote monitoring protocols apply to which chronic condition programs. Dedicated budgets and direct purchasing authority. Physician mailing lists compiled before 2022 do not include this title.
Chief Medical Officers with hybrid care portfolios. The clinical quality and care continuity questions hybrid care raises — which patients are appropriate for virtual visits, how clinical decision quality is maintained without a physical exam — are CMO-level questions requiring CMO-level involvement in the technology decisions that address them.
Population Health Directors and Chronic Disease Management Leads. The clinical co-evaluators for remote monitoring platforms, setting the protocols that determine which platforms serve which patient populations. Almost entirely absent from physician lists built around clinical specialty and practice type.
Where the purchasing urgency is highest
Rural health clinics and federally qualified health centers absorbing patients from rural hospital closures — documented in Physician Data’s research on the rural hospital closure wave — have the most acute need for remote monitoring infrastructure. A small clinical team managing a geographically dispersed, high-chronic-disease-burden population cannot safely rely on quarterly in-person visits alone. Remote monitoring is a clinical safety tool for these organizations, not an enhancement, and the purchasing is supported by HRSA grant funding that creates compliance deadlines alongside purchasing authority.
Digital front door technology sits at the intersection of IT, clinical operations, and patient experience, involving the Director of Digital Health, IT Director, Patient Experience Officer, and often the CMO simultaneously — a multi-stakeholder buying committee that requires healthcare contact databases mapping all of these roles at the same health system account.
The government healthcare funding connection matters here too. State Medicaid programs have expanded telehealth coverage significantly since 2020, and the administrative technology managing Medicaid telehealth billing and outcome reporting is a category spanning healthcare and government simultaneously. Civic Data’s research on state Medicaid officials and government healthcare funding documents how state Medicaid Medical Directors are co-evaluators for the same compliance technology health systems are purchasing from the delivery side.
Building physician mailing lists for the hybrid care market
- Add Director of Digital Health and Virtual Care as a primary, distinct contact category — absent from most databases compiled before it became a standard health system function.
- Map Population Health Directors and Chronic Disease Management Leads as clinical co-evaluators for remote monitoring technology.
- Segment by telehealth program maturity. Health systems with formalized hybrid care programs are in the most active evaluation for second-generation hybrid care technology.
- Include the government healthcare funding layer — state Medicaid telehealth determinations and HRSA grants create co-purchasing conversations spanning physician and civic contact databases.
- Track digital health strategy announcements as leading indicators of active technology evaluation cycles.
The bottom line
The telehealth wave of 2020 was a permanent acceleration of a transition already underway, not a temporary disruption. The clinical technology market serving the hybrid care model it produced is still being built, still being evaluated, and still generating active purchasing. The vendors reaching Directors of Digital Health, Population Health Directors, and CMOs with hybrid care portfolios are competing in that market. The ones routing outreach through traditional clinical specialty contacts are missing the administrative layer where the decisions are actually made.
Build a targeted hybrid care technology buyer list at physician-data.com.
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