As a doctor, why is telemedicine important?
Trained as a family doctor HealthMaker Mark Blatt, MD, talks in this video about his personal experience with how he came to recognize the need for telemedicine.
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING] --over time, giving remote monitoring, sensor technology, video conferencing, telecare, electronic records,
the likelihood I was going to be able to do more and more remotely and electronically.
By training, I'm a family doctor. I practiced in a small town, in Infield, Connecticut, for about 20 years. Probably in the mid '90s, I had an experience on a 4th of July
holiday weekend, where I was taking call for maybe 15 primary care doctors. That's going to be a really bad weekend.
You're going to get very busy. So if you're a parent, you know your kids often get sick on Friday night, as soon
as the doctor's office closes. And if you're kind enough, you wait till Saturday morning before you call me. So Saturday morning, the calls start rolling in.
And mind you, it's a three-day holiday weekend in the summer. I can't send everybody to the walk-in center or the hospital.
My colleagues are going to be upset with me. So probably between 7:00 and noon, 1:00, I must have got 150, 200 phone calls.
And I found that by talking to people and asking them questions-- doing telemedicine with the telephone at the time,
it didn't have any MR, didn't have video conferencing-- I was able to probably dispose of 75%, 80% of the people
that called me. 20% needed some kind of follow-on care. I wasn't about to handle, you know, substernal chest pain on the phone.
But if-- if it sounded reasonable, I took an action. I provided convenient care, in 90 seconds to you,
at a price point that was fantastic. Then, I come back into the office on Monday morning, and all of these calls would get intercepted
by various secretaries. They become billable events. You take a half day off from work, pay me a couple hundred bucks, and we got the same outcome.
I began to feel like a shaman. What am I doing? So I said, I want to develop a way to deliver inexpensive health care to the masses of the world.
And I drank telemedicine Kool-Aid. So I drank the telemedicine Kool-Aid. And I thought that by delivering virtual care services--
again, you can't do everything with virtual care, but there's a lot you can do. And I thought the puck, if you will,
was moving in the direction that, over time, giving remote monitoring sensor technology, video conferencing, telecare, electronic records, the likelihood I
was going to be able to do more and more remotely and electronically. I eliminate the significant part of my overhead when I do that.
So what I have to charge for a visit to be profitable goes down dramatically. So I go back to what Andy Grove taught me
about, really, inflection points. They occur at the 10x. That Saturday morning, in a period of five hours,
I took care of, if you will, more patients than I do in a week. And I did it at a price point that was approximately zero.
health care
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