Tele Health Benefits As an Extension of Conventional Health Insurance Plans

[drjohnson]

I am an ER physician in the Chicago area and have been looking into telehealth solutions to more efficiently and cost-effectively manage the lower acuity patients we treat in the Emergency Departments, Urgent Care and within private practice. As you may have heard, the “virtual visit” allows an employee to quickly connect with a physician via an online (HIPAA compliant) platform: patients can be “seen” and treated within minutes...

I am developing a practice within the Chicago area to offer virtual visits as an added benefit to employee health plans and as an extension of my local house calls practice.

I am researching the best platform for virtual visits/telehealth care and would love to know if you have experience with any of the companies or have implemented these benefits for your clients. Despite the innovation and potential for cost-savings, it’s especially important that patients are seeking medical care from emergency physicians who are trained to treat or refer patients safely and within their local community’s health network.

I appreciate the collective expertise of this forum- I would like to assess the aggregated demand for local and customized tele health options. Assuming your clients would be able to initiate virtual visits with their local emergency physicians, is there a market for adding this option to existing health plans at a cost of $1-2 per month/insured plus $50/per virtual visit? (assuming 10% commission to broker)
Again, I thank you for your consideration and appreciate the opportunity to learn more from the client and broker perspective. I certainly don't enjoy knowing patients have waited hours to see me in the ER only to get a huge bill for about 5 minutes of my time... Looking forward to your responses, Dr. Johnson

 

[STIBROKER]

I appreciate the collective expertise of this forum- I would like to assess the aggregated demand for local and customized tele health options. Assuming your clients would be able to initiate virtual visits with their local emergency physicians,

in the past I have found doctors were not wanting to treat or give treatment advice over the phone or computer with out actually seeing the patient face to face.....could lead to a malpractice suit....

 

[drjohnson]

Yes, this is an appropriate reluctance that I share with my colleagues. This concern validates my contention that the care platform would be ideally administered by local emergency physician specialists who are trained to differentiate the urgent vs. emergent vs. virtual platform for care based on the patient's past medical history and acute illness/concern. The nationally-based tele health visits are not equipped to facilitate urgent follow-ups, specialty referrals or direction to specific Emergency Departments (ideally within network of patient's plan). The present modalities of tele health offer the opportunity for visual consultations on cloud-based online platforms with plug-ins for monitoring of vital signs, blood sugar, weight, cardiac rhythm strips. Many employers are considering on-site kiosks to enable the virtual visit with such enhancements. The convenience and cost-savings are quite significant but not meant to replace primary care medicine.

 

[CHUMPS FROM OXFORD]

"Emergency Departments, Urgent Care and within private practice"

Three totally different scenarios with, of course, different best-case and worst-case outcomes.

Quite simply, there is no easy answer or solution...yet.

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