What should a telehealth founder review each week?

Start with the decisions, then select the numbers

The meeting should answer a few recurring questions: can the business fund its commitments, can the team serve current demand, which exceptions need intervention and what should change next week? Choose numbers that inform those questions. A dashboard with many charts can still fail if no one knows which result calls for a decision.

HHS recommends evaluating a telehealth program against its objectives and using relevant measures and patient feedback. For a founder review, keep business administration distinct from clinical quality oversight. The clinical lead owns clinical interpretation and any care decisions. Invite that lead to report concerns through an agreed route without making clinical outcomes a sales incentive.

Source context: HHS: Developing a direct-to-consumer telehealth strategy

Use a cash view that reconciles

Show opening available cash, collected receipts, paid expenses, upcoming commitments and the ending balance. Separate pending settlements from money already available. Add expected refunds and disputed payments to the review, using your finance team's definitions. Keep forecasts visibly separate from the statement of what happened so projected recurring receipts do not look like funds you can spend today.

Compare the operating ledger, processor records and vendor invoices. When they disagree, assign the reconciliation rather than averaging the figures. Review acquisition spend in the context of patient journeys and costs incurred. The unit economics guide can help define contribution measures, but a contribution estimate is different from cash timing and neither replaces an accountant's review of your records.

Watch age and handoffs, not just volume

Count requests by the stages in your order workflow dictionary. Then show the age of open requests and the number outside your agreed service target. Use the oldest unresolved item as a discussion prompt. A stable total queue can conceal older requests that never move because new requests are being handled first.

Break delays into actionable categories such as incomplete intake, technical failure, awaiting a clinical team's next step, external handoff and unresolved payment question. These categories should reflect verified statuses, not speculation about a person's medical situation. Name a business owner who follows up with the appropriate partner. Clinical triage and urgency are handled through the clinical team's established process.

Add patient friction and technical reliability

HHS identifies patient satisfaction and technical performance as useful evaluation dimensions. Track the support questions patients repeatedly ask, the frequency of access problems and the feedback that follows a completed encounter. Review how the feedback was collected and who responded. A short survey of a small, self-selected group should not be presented as the experience of every patient.

Group support contacts by root issue rather than blaming the individual agent. Repeated questions about a charge may point to unclear checkout language. Repeated requests for an update may point to missing status messages. Record one proposed fix, the person implementing it and the measure you will use to judge whether the issue changed. Protect patient information when sharing examples in a management meeting.

Source context: HHS: Build a sustainable telehealth practice

Close with a short decision log

End the meeting with decisions, not a recap of charts. For each item, record the evidence, action, owner, due date and review date. A pause in advertising, a support-script correction or a request for a vendor reconciliation should each have one accountable owner. Carry unresolved items forward so the same problem does not restart as a new conversation every week.

Set your own alert thresholds using service commitments, staffing and cash requirements. The worksheet contains no industry benchmark or promised conversion rate. Revisit definitions when your model changes and keep a dated definition log. If a metric changes because its calculation changed, label that break so a reporting adjustment is not mistaken for improved performance.

Before you move forward

• Publish a definition and source for each metric.
• Separate collected cash from pending or projected receipts.
• Review the oldest unresolved requests.
• Include patient feedback with its collection limits.
• Finish with dated actions and accountable owners.