Despite the retro title, this blog entry on Huffington Post (a source this editor rarely uses) by Roy Schoenberg, MD, CEO of online consult service American Well, isn’t. He advocates telemedicine (precisely defined as online a/v consults) as a way–not the only one–to fix the broken (his opinion) US healthcare system, to save on costs and bring a better quality of healthcare to all.
He’s a strong advocate of using audio/video so that the doctor visit reaches into the home (naturally) and, moreover, to bring in other specialists in a consultative setting even in the exam room. Where this seems incomplete is: compensation for these regular and ad hoc consultations (who pays and how much), and how to integrate online 1-to-1 or group consults with ongoing telehealth monitoring, which seems to be the logical match. Article. (Read the comments which touch on radiology as near 100% telemedicine, cross-state licensure, and–distressingly, seeing as it is taxpayer dollars at work–how the US government cannot even organize its own online health information to be accessible and not redundant.)