“Virtual care” service provider HealthTap, Palo Alto, California, has updated its platform to facilitate live video consultations with medical specialists and with language interpreters.
The latest version of the company’s HOPES “health operating system,” unveiled Tuesday morning, supports multi-participant video, voice and text interactions in a secure, encrypted environment. This allows medical professionals, caregivers and patients to call on specialists from HealthTap’s network of more than 100,000 U.S. physicians.
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Alternatively, customers can bring in their own physicians by getting those doctors to sign into the HealthTap platform. “You can choose between the HealthTap network or any other doc,” said CEO Ron Gutman.
This multi-user environment also enables the telehealth company to bring interpreters into online consultations. HealthTap initially has contracted with interpreters in 21 languages, including American Sign Language and everything from Spanish, Russian and Mandarin to more exotic tongues like Amharic, Tigrinya and Urdu.
“This really opens up virtual care to billions of people all over the world,” Gutman said.
He said the company has registered users in 174 different countries. “We are getting requests every single day for services in different languages,” Gutman explained.
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The telehealth provider charges $45 per episode for medical interpretation services, Gutman said. The cost of a specialty consult varies, depending on the circumstances.
Subscribers to the HealthTap Prime service get unlimited access to a pool of primary care physicians for a monthly fee. There’s a copay to bring in a specialist, Gutman said.
HealthTap Concierge, which allows patients to build relationships with specific physicians in 141 specialties, simply facilitates online consultations on a pay-per-use basis. “You can do it with your own doctor,” Gutman said. In that case, each physician bills the patient’s insurer.
As with the previous version of HOPES, the update gives each patient a personal health record to document online encounters. Patients can share these records with family members and health professionals both in and outside the HealthTap network, Gutman said.
Here’s a video from the company about the service:
Photo: HealthTap