Telemedicine Vs “Dr Google”
Follow-up to: My Return To The Consumerization of Healthcare
After my last post, My Return To The Consumerization of Healthcare, I received a lot of inbound messages from people, more than I ever expected. Most of these messages included similar experiences people shared about having important health questions but not having an outlet to get them answered. Frustrating to hear, but it further validated our findings on why people turn to Google search for answers to health concerns. Many others asked me why we thought the telemedicine solutions on the market today don’t solve this problem. Let me explain.
First, as an industry, telemedicine is booming. It is estimated to be a $30 billion market in the next 10 years and is already estimated to drive over $10 billion in annual revenue. The largest publicly traded telemedicine company, Teladoc, currently has a market cap of $1.3 Billion. However, Telemedicine is not a separate medical specialty. Telemedicine is simply a larger investment by healthcare providers in information technology to extend the delivery of their services. Video chats, phone calls, or text chat with a physician create an extension of the current healthcare system. These investments improve access to care and can lower costs in *some* aspects of care. All great news for the overall improvement of our healthcare system.
However, when implemented within the same healthcare system, telemedicine doesn’t change the paradigm. People are still left to search online for their own answers to their health questions. The incentives and the business models are still the same with telemedicine as with traditional medicine. By design, physicians on a video chat still act just as they do in their office. Billing insurance, updating patients’ healthcare records, treating the patient, ordering tests, and prescribing medicine.
When we asked people why they turned to online search rather than contacting their doctor, the reasons we found where:
- They didn’t want to ask a doctor a dumb question
- They didn’t want to be asked to come into the doctor’s office just yet
- They wanted to learn more before a test or exam was ordered
- They had already contacted their doctor previously and didn’t want to bother them again, or wanted clarification of something their doctor told them.
Telemedicine doesn’t address any of these reasons people gave for favoring online search over contacting their doctor’s office. Furthermore, when we asked if they would use an existing Telemedicine product for these situations, many responded that they already have a primary care doctor. They like their doctor, they’ve built a relationship with their doctor, and they didn’t want to see another doctor — even if it was over video chat. We called this response the “cheating on your doctor” with a virtual doctor response. These people aren’t looking for a new doctor, yet that is exactly how most telemedicine services position themselves to consumers.
Also, there is the cost. The costs of current telemedicine solutions to consumers are very close to the cost of visiting a doctor in person. These solutions can still cost the consumer $40 to $100 to use. The average co-pay in the United States is about $24 and rising. But to use a telemedicine solution that costs $50 just doesn’t seem reasonable.
Very low adoption rates of telemedicine by consumers demonstrate some support to these findings that there is something fundamentally missing from the telemedicine experience. Sure the industry is booming in terms of enterprise sales, but the actual use of these products by patients is not there. TelaDoc conducted only 200K remote visits in Q3 of last year with just under 20 million members. That is an adoption rate of only 1% per quarter!! Yikes…
The CEO of Doctor on Demand, another leading telemedicine company, also stated in a recent interview with design/strategy company Fresh Tilled Soil that adoption rate is Doctor on Demand’s biggest challenge. He stated:
“I think the biggest challenge for us, and the thing that I think the most about, is how do we get the word out better about what we do? In our little world, we know exactly about the value proposition that we provide consumers, providers, and payers, but I’m still blown away by how few people in America know about telemedicine, and that we exist, and know that they can access our product. Tens of millions of Americans have access to Doctor On Demand through their insurance plans or employers and we also have a direct-pay business, with lower pricing than charged in emergency rooms and doctors’ offices.”
When you look at the numbers of people who instead turn to online search, you’ll see very contrasting adoption rates, with over 100 billion online health searches conducted each year. A reported 71% of Americans conduct online health searches.
Don’t get me wrong, the telemedicine solutions available today are a huge value to consumers who need it. Reducing costs and increasing access to care is a great thing. But when you look at the problem we are solving, when you look deeply into why people turn to online search, why they stress themselves out and how they try to understand complex, “scary”, “overwhelming”, and sometimes unrelated medical information online — telemedicine solutions available today aren’t the right solution.
Related Teaser Posts For Our Upcoming Launch
- My Return To The Consumerization Of Healthcare
- Telemedicine Vs “Dr Google”
- Why telemedicine has poor adoption rates and the healthcare customer’s journey
- What Healthcare can learn from the Travel and Automotive Industries
- New Symptom checkers and health chatbots will fail at direct to consumer
- Healthcare, Blockchain, And The Consumerization of Healthcare
- Dear healthcare system, the phone call is dead
- We’ve launched …publicly — Nurse-1–1
