Telehealth has grown rapidly in recent years, with related claims surging more than 50% from 2016 to 2017, according to Fair Health Inc., which collects health insurance data. But it’s still a small market. In the past year, about 10% of consumers used long-distance medicine instead of a visit to the doctor’s office, urgent care center or emergency room, according to a July 2019 J.D. Power survey.
It’s unclear whether long-distance medicine is up to today’s challenge. A doctor shortage and unprecedented interest are extending the wait times of supposedly on-demand health care -- in some cases, for more than an hour. Such delays have led companies to recruit more physicians and consider some who are in retirement.
Hill Ferguson, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Doctor on Demand Inc., said about a third of current inquiries are related to coronavirus. The rest are seeking help for other health issues, such as diabetes and hypertension, because they are stuck at home. “We are treating more of everything, not just coronavirus,” said Ferguson, whose company’s backers include Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
K Health Inc., which is based in New York, is trying to make its process even faster. Its 70 doctors are seeing as many as three dozen patients a day, mostly through text messages, while software analyzes symptoms. “We are doing more than 1,000 conversations a day on the platform, and it is growing very rapidly,” said Allon Bloch, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
Jay Parkinson, founder of telemedicine company Sherpaa Health Inc., worries about the risk of an industry designed to treat minor ailments such as pink eye, not determine whether to send a critically ill patient to find a scarce test or respirator.
“Our entire system is set up for cheap transactions” that involve 10-minute interactions with doctors that patients won’t likely see again, he said. “It is very hard to do anything safely if there is no long-term relationship.”
Shivan Mehta, associate chief innovation officer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Medicine Center for Innovation, said the need for more intense interactions depends on an ailment’s severity.
“We are starting to learn when is a video really important, when is a telephone call OK, when is a secure email appropriate,” Mehta said. This crisis is “a natural experiment that will tell us what works and what doesn’t.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.