As a followup to our post a few weeks back, sharing with you a recent article on the rise of telemedicine and doctors making “house calls” via video. Unified communications is a critical component and catalyst for this service. While not all states are quick to adopt telemedicine, and insurance companies don’t agree on whether virtual house calls save money or cost more, one thing for sure, consumers (patients) are often thrilled to adopt this approach.

OneCloud Networks follows telemedicine closely and works to enable a secure and unified approach for practitioners and patients alike. Providing a secure “meeting room” for audio and videoconferencing with integrated document sharing capability, provides a complete solution.

The article below is written by Abby Goodnough, healthcare reporter for the New York Times and widely known and published author in healthcare. It appeared in the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, Morning Consult Health, and others.

TACOMA, Wash. — One night, when her face turned puffy and painful from what she thought was a sinus infection, Jessica DeVisser briefly considered going to an urgent care clinic, but then decided to try something “kind of sci-fi.”



She sat with her laptop on her living room couch, went online and requested a virtual consultation. She typed in her symptoms and credit card number, and within half an hour, a doctor appeared on her screen via Skype. He looked her over, asked some questions and agreed she had sinusitis. In minutes, Ms. DeVisser, a stay-at-home mother, had an antibiotics prescription called in to her pharmacy.

“I’m terrible about going to the doctor, just because of the time it takes,” Ms. DeVisser, 35, said. “This feels empowering: You just click a button and the doctor comes to you.”

But telemedicine is facing pushback from some more traditional corners of the medical world. Medicare, which often sets the precedent for other insurers, strictly limits reimbursement for telemedicine services out of concern that expanding coverage would increase, not reduce, costs. Some doctors assert that hands-on exams are more effective and warn that the potential for misdiagnoses via video is great.

Legislatures and medical boards in some states are listening carefully to such criticisms, and a few, led by Texas, are trying to slow the rapid growth of virtual medicine. But many more states are embracing the new world of virtual house calls, largely by updating rules to allow doctor-patient relationships to be established and medications to be prescribed via video. Health systems, facing stiff competition from urgent care centers, retail clinics and start-up companies that offer video consultations through apps for smartphones and tablets, are increasingly offering the service as well.

While telemedicine consultations have been around for decades, they have mostly connected specialists with patients in remote areas, who almost always had to visit a clinic or hospital for the videoconference. The difference now is that patients can be wherever they want and use their own smartphones or tablets for the visits, which are trending toward more basic care.

In Philadelphia, Jefferson University Hospitals now lets patients have video follow-up visits with internists, urologists, and ear, nose and throat specialists. Mount Sinai Health System in New York is starting to offer video visits for primary care patients. Mercy, a health system based in St. Louis, will soon open a $54 million virtual care center to house a number of telemedicine programs, including urgent and primary care video consultations for chronically ill and other high-risk patients who need frequent assessments and advice.

Advocates say virtual visits for basic care could reduce costs over the long term. It is cheaper to operate telemedicine services than brick-and-mortar offices, allowing companies to charge as little as $40 or $50 for consultations — less than for visits to emergency rooms, urgent care centers and doctors’ offices. They also say that by letting people talk to a doctor whenever they need to, from home or work, virtual visits make for more satisfied and potentially healthier patients than traditional appointments that are available only at certain times.

Hope Sickmeier, 51, a fourth-grade teacher in Ashland, Mo., used her Anthem insurance for a virtual urgent care visit one Saturday night, three days into a toothache that kept getting worse. A week earlier, she had gone to the emergency room with a migraine and owed a $200 co-payment.

This time she grabbed her iPad, downloaded the app for the visits and scanned a list of available doctors, choosing one with “a trustworthy face.”

When the doctor appeared on her screen, she told him her symptoms and, holding her iPad close to her face, showed him her painful tooth and the swelling in her jaw.

“I was in so much pain, I didn’t care that it was weird,” Ms. Sickmeier said. “He got right to the point, which was what I wanted. He prescribed antibiotics and called them into an all-night pharmacy about 20 minutes away.”

Washington State gave a victory to the industry in April when Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, signed legislation requiring insurers to cover a range of telemedicine services if they already cover those services when provided in person. But the new law, which made Washington the 24th state to ensure reimbursement for some telemedicine services, does not cover virtual urgent care outside a medical facility.

 

Still, the law “opens the doors with a lot of our payers,” said Matt Levi, CHI Franciscan Health’s director of virtual health services. He added that some insurers, like Molina Healthcare of Washington, the state’s largest Medicaid plan, were starting to cover virtual urgent care, though the law does not require it.

“We are jumping in with both feet on this,” said Peter Adler, president of Molina Healthcare of Washington. “We think it’s the future, and it’s here now.”

Some large insurers are starting to pay, too. United Healthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, announced in April that it would cover virtual visits for most of its 26 million commercial members by next year, citing the shortage of primary care doctors and the cost of less than $50 per virtual visit. Anthem will cover virtual urgent care visits for 16 million members in 11 states by the end of this year, and it expects the number to reach 20 million next year. Both insurers are relying on third-party telemedicine companies to provide the doctors and the technology platform for the service, just as most health systems do for now.

Even as virtual visits multiply, researchers say it is not clear whether they really save money or provide better outcomes.