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The Limitations Of 'Dial-A-Doc' Telemedicine

This article is more than 8 years old.

The future of healthcare delivery will include telemedicine. There will be many different business models; the “dial-a-doc” telemedicine model of today will unlikely be effective.

The delivery of healthcare is evolving due primarily to financial considerations augmented by technological advancements. Looking to the super-rich, the family offices, the affluent, and senior executives, it is clear that some form of telemedicine will probably become normative for everyone.

Today, the financial and corporate elite – especially family offices and the super-rich – are gravitating to high-caliber concierge telemedicine practices. Characteristics of such practices are:

  • The practice must be totally committed to the care of their client-patients.
  • Beyond any particular medical problem, the staff should have a broad/holistic understanding of each client/patient.
  • The practices’ physicians and all their related referral network specialists should be board certified in their field of practice.
  • There should be a focus on wellness, prevention, and longevity.
  • Patients should have rapid easy access to their concierge physician on a 24/7/365 basis.

While there is a cost for the services, for most client/patients the advantages of the service are proving to exponentially outweigh the expense. At the same time, other firms are looking to capitalize on the benefits of telemedicine. However, these firms tend to have significant limitations including:

  • The questionable quality of some of the doctors answering calls
  • The lack of follow up making care discontinuous
  • The problem of consistency if someone contacts the service more than once

According to Daniel Carlin, M.D., president of WorldClinic, an elite concierge telemedicine practice, “Many of the big telemedicine companies are not care providers. They are marketing companies with big marketing budgets that have built a network of subcontracted physicians willing to receive a patient phone call. There is a broad range of quality among these doctors. This is not surprising given that the doctor earns, on average, $20 per call.”

Aside from these firms, a number of other firms as well as medical institutions will be embracing telemedicine going forward. For many of these providers to be able to deliver high-quality healthcare, they will likely need to master the hard-learned lessons of some of the exceptional concierge healthcare telemedicine providers.