Teladoc CMO Dr. Henry DePhillips
At this year’s ATA conference, MedCity News sat down with Teladoc Chief Medical Officer Dr. Henry DePhillips, who discussed telebehavioral health services, telehealth utilization and protecting patient privacy.
This exchange has been lightly edited.
Teladoc isn’t the only telehealth company branching into behavioral health. What sets Teladoc apart from competitors like American Well and MDLive?
There are two differentiators for Teladoc. We entered the behavioral space with 14 years of experience in telehealth. We’re already a 50 state company with thousands of clients and millions of visits.
The second differentiator is that we took a little longer to get to market because we built a complete, comprehensive end-to-end platform. We have industry standard tools that measure your goals. We can demonstrate outcomes, and if progress isn’t being made, we alter course.
There’s a warmth factor in face-to-face interaction, which is especially important in behavioral health. Do you find a difference between how patients react to telehealth for primary care versus telehealth for behavioral health?
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With our behavioral health program, as with our other programs, we offer a choice of modalities for how to interact with the psychiatrist or the therapist. We have a world-class audio/video platform.
Specific to behavioral health, we can do video visits. There are some circumstances where there’s a particular desire to do a video visit, and even if the patient requests a phone-based visit, the therapist or psychiatrist has the latitude to say, “I want to see you now, so let’s switch to video.” And if you’re on a device that has video, you can switch in line with the visit.
But let me tell you the other side of your question is just like there are some issues that video adds to, there also are some diagnoses where the patients are more comfortable if they’re not seeing the provider. Think post-traumatic stress disorder, think some of the phobias.
What we see is in our behavioral health program, our number one diagnosis is depression. Our number two is anxiety. Our number three diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder. And that diagnosis lends itself particularly well to telemedicine because you don’t have to get in your car, travel, sit in a waiting room and walk into the room with the therapist, which can be a little intimidating.
The video warmth goes both ways.
What have been the challenges to getting insurers to cover telebehavioral health services?
The truth is that we have had fewer challenges getting payers to cover all of our services than most other companies.
Back in the beginning before I was with the company, we targeted employers first. Our benefit was so the employees could have access to care that was easier and more convenient that would cause them to not have to leave work to get care.
We later started selling to insurance companies whose clients are employers. We have 30-plus health insurance companies nationwide. We said, ‘We have this model in place. Here’s how we charge clients for it and here’s how we pay providers to do it.’ What we somewhere between suggested and required the payers to do was to participate in the payment methodology we had already developed and had success with. The health insurance companies that use our service pay us and then we pay all the providers.
We have no problem with insurance coverage, really.
Telehealth utilization rates are low. Why do you think telehealth isn’t catching on extremely quickly with everyone? What is Teladoc doing to increase these rates?
The data points are that visit volume at Teladoc year over year is going up faster than the membership growth of Teladoc year over year. One of the reasons Teladoc has had huge success with utilization is that in every step of the process, we have offered consumers a choice of how to interact with our system.
There’s a choice about how to request a visit. If you’re a traditionalist, we have a call center with employed customer service reps that can navigate you through the system by phone. We have apps that have won awards and over 600,000 downloads of our iPhone app, Android app. We have an app for the providers to receive visit requests. All of the web browsers are supported.
We meet people where they want to be met, making it a consumer centric focus where the patient thinks, “I’m sick, how should I get care?” We give consumers a choice every step of the way. How to request a visit? Choices. How to interact with the doctor? Choices.
What we find is, there’s a lot of competitors that are having trouble driving utilization. And it’s because they only offer one modality for how to interact with the doctor, and it’s not the one most people want. We are heads and shoulders above the industry on utilization. We’ve learned along the way. We have the ability to be very specific in how we communicate with each of those different segments of our client base.
MDLive was recently sued over patient privacy issues. What is Teladoc doing to ensure patients’ information is protected?
We are HIPAA-compliant. We have lots of clients where information security is No. 1. On an ongoing proactive basis, we actually hire companies to attempt to break into our database. We learn from them what our potential vulnerabilities are and fix them before they’re ever taken advantage of. We take it incredibly seriously.
Photo: Teladoc
