A telemedicine entrepreneur who spent the past couple of years at a couple of Walmart clinics in a Philadelphia suburb as a tenant has developed partnerships with a health system and a European healthcare business that want to adopt his practice model.
In a phone interview with MedCity News, Dr Raj Shah said Telemed Ventures had inked a deal with Temple University Health System to use its Smart Care Doc telemedicine platform for pre-op medical evaluations at Temple’s Fort Washington offices. The idea is to make the service available for patients who would have trouble making it to Temple University Hospital‘s main location in Philadelphia.
It’s an interesting move that deploys telemedicine as a way to make it easier for patients to keep appointments and raises some interesting questions about how the health system is thinking about the service. Shah said it’s also making a push into Europe through a partnership with Northern Ireland’s largest private medicine group — 3FiveTwo Group.
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It’s also in talks with a couple of Philadelphia area nursing homes to provide a general service to residents.
Shah said the company has a two-pronged business model: direct-to-consumer and a virtual clinic with many uses. The Walmart practice used Bluetooth-enabled medical devices such as a digital stethoscope, a handheld EKG device, a finger pulse reader and a digital thermometer. The nurse would use the devices with the patient in the clinic room as the attending physician interacted through a video screen. All of the readings from these devices are transmitted to the attending physician or entered into a computer and sent to the physician in real time.
Patients also received continuity of care documents records, an explanation of the medical problems diagnosed from their encounters with Smart Care Doc physicians, prescribed medications, allergies and appointments.
Summoning up his experience at Walmart, Shah said: “My R&D is done. The purpose of the clinic was to deploy our telemedicine platform and see if patients pay [$59] for it.” In the past two years Shah has said it has “ironed out the bugs.” It has also added a patient portal. Initially the plan had been to grow the business if it was able to attract enough patients. But the new partnerships offer a more practical way for Shah to build his business.
Shah channeled his marketing moxy to dismiss the sizable competition Smart Doc faces from other telemedicine businesses. “Most telemedicine companies are just doing sophisticated video conferencing. We’re doing physical examinations and diagnosing problems.”
There’s plenty of experimentation in telemedicine to determine which model will stick. Healthcare startups need to have a sizable partner in their corner to help them gain access to the patient population they need to make their business work.
