We reported last week on American Well’s gold Edison Award for a ‘practice edition’ of its telemedicine platform. Online Care for Providers gives physicians the opportunity to set up their own online consults via video, phone or text chat. Each online visit creates a record that can be imported into EMRs. American Well also promotes their payment tracking (a claim is submitted to the patient’s health plan with the co-pay collected directly from the patient’s credit card), the ability for the physician to initiate ‘concierge medicine’ and also malpractice coverage specifically for online care. Since the American Well model was built on working with insurance payers, will this be perceived as a conflict by them or will they promote the platform? Release
[Picky, picky, picky Ed. Donna notes that American Well refers to its platform as telehealth, which to your editors means vital signs remote monitoring, not videoconferencing or telemedicine. Ed. Steve’s ‘What is telecare’ is a guide to the terminology tsunami.]