In October, an article in Fortune.com noted how Kaiser Permanente’s CEO talked about harnessing mobile technologies and online communications to deliver virtual care to its members at a conference in San Francisco.
“For the first time, last year, we had over 110 million interactions between our physicians and our members,” Bernard Tyson reportedly said in that article adding that 52% of them were done via smartphone, videoconferencing, kiosks, and other technology tools.
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Those numbers didn’t sit well with Milton Chen, CEO of VSee, a video communications and telehealth platform used by the likes of NASA, Walgreens, and Intermountain Healthcare, among others.
And at VSee’s first conference on telemedicine — Telehealth Failures and the Secrets to Success — in San Jose on Friday, Chen pointed out some details behind that seemingly impressive stat from Kaiser.
“Patients go on their patient portal and they schedule an appointment or email the provider and that is counted as a [virtual] encounter,” Chen informed the assembled audience.
Later, in an interview after his remarks, Chen said that he did not desire to “offend” anyone but sending messages to providers or using an app to schedule appointments should not be deemed as telemedicine.
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“The hype is phenomenal,” he declared. “Telemedicine should include talking to the physician or remote patient monitoring — things that actually matter clinically — instead of sending a message.”
The speaker who followed Chen couldn’t agree more about the telehealth hype that continues — even amidst of high-profile flops like the shuttering of HealthSpot that had reportedly raised more than $40 million and had partners/customers like Cleveland Clinic and Rite Aid.
“There’s been an awful lot of Kool-Aid drinking, and for the most part we’re the ones that are serving up the Kool-Aid,” said James Mault, vice president and chief medical officer at Qualcomm Life that has been gaining traction in the marketplace by setting up the cloud-based wireless infrastructure that powers connectivity and telehealth.
And then he shared two slides that pulled the curtain back on what is actually happening in the market.
The first showed that 72 percent of hospitals have telemedicine programs today and the percentage of large employers who provide telemedicine benefits have jumped to 74 percent in 2016 up from 48% only a year ago. This year 1.2 million people are projected to have virtual doctor visits in the U.S., up 20% from 2015.
Here’s a photo of the slide:
Looks pretty impressive, doesn’t it? OK, now let’s put that in perspective, Mault said, as she called up another slide.
The number of physicians visits per year is little less than a billion. Compare that to the Wall Street Journal article that was “touting” the fact that there had been a 20% growth in telemedicine visits to $1.2 million in 2016 from $1 million.
In other words, as Mault put it mildly with a heavy dose of understatement:
“We’re not quite there yet,” as the audience broke out in laughter. “Let’s get real.”
Photo: Bigstock Photo
