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E-Visits To the Doctor To Top 75 Million In the US, Canada This Year
Lucas123 (935744) writes "Telehealth medicine, or communicating remotely with patients through electronic means, will be used by nearly one in six North Americans this year, according to Deloitte. With an aging Baby Boomer population and a growing shortage of primary care physicians, electronic visits (eVisits) reduce both time and cost in treating common ailments. The overall cost of in-person primary physician visits worldwide is $175 billion. Globally, the number of eVisits will climb to 100 million this year, potentially saving over $5 billion when compared to the cost of in-person doctor visits. Last November, The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) revamped its patient portal, renaming it MyUPMC, and rolling out AnywhereCare, offering patients throughout Pennsylvania eVisits with doctors 24 hours a day, seven days a week either over the phone or through video conferencing. The service offers a 30-minute or less wait time and saves the hospital system more than $86 per patient over a traditional visit."
because every time i took my kids to the doctor they take the temperature and blood pressure right there and the doctor needs to do a physical exam to verify the symptoms are bacterial or viral
do they bill your insurance the same price as an in person visit? or say a price that is a little smaller?
The AMA and HIPAA will not let that happen.
I support this. In my experience US primary care doctors are not very good. They rely too much on technology, lab tests, imaging, drugs and specialists, instead of using their skills for proper diagnosis. OTOH, non-American and non-European doctors are more self-sufficient.
Also, many doctors, nurses and pharmacists in the US are hopelessly overqualified for what they do, leading to additional costs.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
US medical practitioners are both overqualified and 'not very good'. A very disturbing conjunction of abilities...
Compared to a mythical Star-Trek like gauge of medical quality (rapid efficient diagnosis and treatment, all happening within the space of a commercial break), nobody is 'very good' - medicine is still pretty primitive. Just hang tight for another 50-60 years and things should be better.
Oh. Wait.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I support this. In my experience US primary care doctors are not very good. They rely too much on technology, lab tests, imaging, drugs and specialists, instead of using their skills for proper diagnosis. OTOH, non-American and non-European doctors are more self-sufficient.
Are they really all that more self-sufficient, or do we simply find the US doctor reliant on all that technology, lab tests, imaging, drugs, and specialists not because they are incompetent or inferior, but do so in order to simply cover their ass enough to avoid a career-crushing lawsuit.
It helps when you take into account all the factors when making claims like this.
The AMA and HIPAA will not let that happen.
Why in the heck would you think that is true? Where I work every single bit of handwritten information about you is already sent to the Philippines for transcription. Nearly everything else is too because electronic records are sent for medical coding. A Bangladeshi company handles collections so they have access to nearly all of your information so they can do their job. Also, we sell discharge data to several foreign companies, because Bill Archer, a stupid DINO like the rest of the so-called Democrats in this country, decided that information should not be protected.
Even worse is that HIPAA is limited to only a select few people. If you're not a "covered entity," then you are under no requirement to protect patient privacy.
Does the amount of savings expected include the additional costs of misdiagnosis that might be higher over the phone than in-person? Alternately, the savings could be even higher if it leads to serious conditions being diagnosed sooner from people being more willing to make a phone call than visit the hospital.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
This article is total nonsense:
Electronic visits or telemedicine is comprised of electronic document exchanges, telephone consultations, email or texting, and videoconferencing between physicians and patients.
So you call your doctor: "please refill my cholesterol pills"
That counts as an evisit.
Your doctor sends you message: "Your test results are in"
That counts as an evisit.
The summary makes it sound like there were 75million video conference visits... which is not even remotely the case.
The patient gets plenty of benefits from this, one being not having to go to the clinic and wait in line, not having to drive somewhere, not having to interrupt your day. With mobile Internet you should be able to connect to a doctor on the go.
There are costs associated with setting the system up and training the stuff to work with it, to maintain and support it, but the benefits are for both, the hospitals, clinics and for patients.
In any case, you are not forced to use it.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Most visits are because of the American drug war. I have to see my physician every two months because my insomnia medication is soooo abusable. Can't have addicts sleeping all day. My wife has a prescription for an ADD medication that helps keep her awake. She has to take a drug test to make sure she is actually using it, can't have those addicts being productive now can we. Imagine a cocktail of these, probably something like dividing by zero.
It does not matter what the factors are, what matters is the result.
However, if you want my opinion, it is a result of the insane amount of meddling by the government in the healthcare industry. The result will be outsourcing as per this discussion, and medical tourism.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
it's not like doctors are just hanging around in front of a terminal waiting for you. you still get to initiate the call, then wait in a queue until a doctor is available [not necessarily one you have seen before], and they probably bill you if you walk away from the terminal and don't run back immediately when you finally get to 'see' the doctor.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
But could someone kindly explain what "hoirs" (in the summary) are?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
There are many primary care doctors in the US that are at least as good as foreign doctors. However, there are many things that factor into your observation. The first is that many highly skilled physicians choose to sub-specialize because it is both more academically stimulating and more lucrative (I am a sub-sub-specialized physician). For better or worse, the field is geared toward sub-specialization. This dilutes the number of quality primary care physicians. It also puts a ton of time pressure on primary physicians, since we have fewer primary physicians per capita than many other nations. They simply don't have time to perform thorough exams so they rely on referrals and testing.
Also, there are expectations by patients placed on primary physicians for tests and drugs. Primary physicians, under financial and practice pressure to keep things moving, tend to get into a pattern of giving the patients what they want to keep things moving. This tends to create bad habits. I will say that this happens much less at good academic institutions where there are somewhat less financial pressures and physicians try to keep up to date due to their academic status.
I do also believe there has been some erosion in physical exam skills in modern physicians that come from less reliance on them. If you can get a chest film to diagnose pneumonia, why waste 10 minutes percussing on a patients back? In reality, the sensitivity and specificity of percussion of a skilled physician is probably significantly less than a chest film, and if you're not facile, then forget it.
I agree, but the most important one is NOT being in the waiting room with loads of infectious people for minutes or hours!
I have a BP machine at home. Why? Because I have what my doctor calls "white coat hypertension." What that means is I get nervous when I go in to the doctor's office and my BP goes up. Measured at home, my BP is on the high side of normal, but fine. At the Dr's office it is at the high side of prehypertension or low side of hypertension. It's not a difference in the machines, they have me bring mine in to check the calibration.
Ok well that means they can't keep an accurate record from their measurements. So they need me to measure it myself, which I do, and then let them see the results. These days such a thing is very feasible since electronics technology means we can produce quite accurate automated systems, that aren't that much.
For that matter a large part of your physical can be, and is, automated that being the blood test. You need a skilled person to draw the blood, but after that it is usually a computerized system that does all the analysis. It can be done by a separate lab from your doctor.
You still need to see them in person for plenty of things, but there is plenty of stuff that can be reported to them remotely and they can just look at the results. I don't see this as a bad thing, personally.