Two small, lesser-known telehealth companies, Salus Telehealth of Waycross, Georgia, and Chicago-based VideoMedicine, have merged and now hope to leverage their combined strength to take on the big players.
The new Salus Telehealth brings together a traditional telehealth and remote monitoring platform from Salus and a mobile app from VideoMedicine that connects consumers to physicians, including specialists. “We needed an app to be competitive,” Salus CEO Paula Guy said.
Guy said the VideoMedicine app was designed as a pay-per-use consumer product that lets physicians conduct full assessments and make diagnoses by video.
Salus Telehealth’s revenue model includes a direct-to-consumer option, but the company mostly sells subscriptions through employers, health plans, Accountable Care Organizations and even pharmacies and ambulance companies. Salus also has a charge per episode that can be billed to insurance or the patient.
“We make money every time people use our service,” Guy said.
“We are ready to turn the telehealth world on its head — whether in a hospital, clinic, rural medi-van, ambulance, pharmacy chain, corporate environment or home, VideoMedicine CEO and Founder Dr. Charles Butler said in a statement. “Our new combined company will be able to provide innovative solutions to life-altering problems in a cost-effective way that would not be possible without the combination of these two companies,” Butler added.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
One thing that the new Salus Telehealth brings to the table, according to Guy, is the ability to integrate data from peripheral medical devices, including home-based devices, through both the core telehealth platform and the mobile app.
The company will maintain dual headquarters in rural Waycross — closer to Jacksonville, Florida, than to Atlanta — and not-so-rural downtown Chicago, Guy said.
VideoMedicine raised has raised slightly more than $3.6 million from unspecified sources, according to data provided by Butler. Salus Telehealth has raised $1 million, the same document indicated.
Salus grew out of a nonprofit called the Georgia Partnership for Telehealth that seeks to expand medical coverage in underserved rural areas. The Georgia Partnership spawned similar programs in neighboring Alabama and Florida and morphed into a program called the Global Partnership for Telehealth that provides telemedicine services in low-resource areas overseas.
The Global Partnership for Telehealth spun off Salus as a for-profit company in June 2015.
Photo: Flickr user newtonapple
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mistakenly attributed the quote from Butler. The amount of money the companies have raised also has been updated.
