Just wondering, has anyone here heard of or used any of the following services: Doctor on Demand MD Live Teladoc Healthtap Klara ...etc. They are all telemedicine providers, where you can basically have a video consultation with your doctor from your smartphone. I believe some of the more innovative health plans, like Kaiser Permanente, have their own solutions. If you have tried one of them, I'd be interested in your take whether you found the service useful and whether you had to pay out of pocket or whether it was reimbursed.
Why do you think so? There seems to have been a lot of funding going into these companies recently. Teladoc raised $ 150M in an IPO, Doctor on Demand (founded by the son of Dr. Phil) raised $ 50 M, MD Live as well.
Telemedicine is great for areas that don't have abundance of health professionals. The only problem I've seen with doctors not wanting to work with telemedicine include the issues of cross state medical malpractice risk.
https://www.hioscar.com/ Have you heard of Oscar Health Care? Goldman Sachs and some other big VC's recently invested in this company and currently has a 1.5B valuation. Oscar claims to become the Airbnb/Uber of health insurance. They use elements of telemedicine as well. You can shop for doctors based on your symptoms and then you will be given an up front price list for these services after taking into account your insurance status. http://www.wired.com/2015/04/oscar-funding/ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/b...ance-start-up-valued-at-1-5-billion.html?_r=0 http://fortune.com/2015/04/20/oscar-raises-145-million/
We offered Teladoc to our employees for two years. Not many took advantage of their services, so we didn't re-up with them for 2015, but those few who did use them always had great things to say.
Super interesting. I have heard of them and read about their funding and valuation, but wasn't aware of their telemedicine activities. Thank you.
I've used the nurse by phone plenty. It's useful, and faster than finding someone in person, but still not terribly fast in my experience. I understand there's a lot of state-by-state regulation around doing telemedicine with doctors in the US. I believe in Texas you can do phone and not video. And, that they want to limit telemedicine to doctors who have seen you in person before. I have a feature with my health insurance. The copay is higher than a doctor's visit but lower than an emergency room visit.
Telehealth + Medical Device Integration is the next big thing in medicine. Being able to take your basic vitals, chat with a doc via your TV and get your scripts either delivered or sent directly to your local pharmacy is going to be huge.
One of my friends got his Doctorate with a specialization in Telemedicine, and he gives seminars and lectures at Case Western. It's definitely a growing field with lots of potential. However, just like any field that's in its infancy, there are still lots of kinks and wrinkles that need to be worked out including fraud, malpractice, quality control, etc.
We offer access to nurses through EAP and doctors through Teledoc. I haven't used the services personally, but it really comes in handy for our hourly employees who work rotating shift schedules.
