HONOLULU, HI – The Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA), the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan of the Aloha State, will become the first health plan to deploy American Well's new Online Care Team Edition. The new service will bring live, on-demand specialist care consultations into primary care docs' exam rooms – reducing the delay, inconvenience and cost associated with the traditional patient referral process.
Roy Schoenberg, MD, president and CEO of Boston-based American Well, which already enables online doctor visits from the home or office, says this next step will "transform the availability of healthcare services inside the primary care physician's office.”
"Imagine your primary care physician decides that you need a referral," Schoenberg explains. "Today, the ritual that follows is they give you that referral, and depending on your health insurance product you do or do not need to get approval for it. But essentially you go home and you need to find a physician of that type, and you need to schedule an appointment, and then you need to wait six weeks until you see them, and then you travel and see them, and then you come back home, and then you go back to your primary care physician.
"Now imagine that instead of this, when you walk into your physician's office and they decide that they need to have this referral, they have an online care system on their desk as part of their regular computer. They have the ability to look at dermatologists, for example, that are within their network, and they have the ability to bring up a live consultation with that dermatologist right there, when you're in their office, instead of sending you for referral."
The upshot, says Schoenberg, is that "the scope of care that can be given to you in a timely fashion by your primary care physician is now completely transformed."
"We are harnessing technology to transform the delivery and availability," of healthcare said Ido Schoenberg, MD, chairman and CEO of American Well. "Team Edition extends quality specialty care into the hands of the patient’s own primary care physician, allowing them to render and coordinate much broader, timely and convenient care for their patient panel. The primary care practice is now the gateway to the rest of the healthcare system, irrespective of its location."
The Team Edition launch accompanies recent market and clinical research that documents the increased quality and lowered costs of improved provider-to-provider collaboration. A recent meta-analysis of 23 studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that improved interactive communication between primary care physicians and specialists was associated with improved patient outcomes and delivered a "better return on investment than many clinical interventions."
What's more, it greatly expands access to care, allowing one’s primary care doctor to "consult with any other physician, anywhere else in the country," says Ido Schoenberg, and for remote and/or rural areas, that's hugely valuable, he adds.
"Our geographic isolation from the rest of the country has provided some unique issues," says Mike Cheng, HMSA senior vice president. "HMSA’s Online Care has allowed us to bridge that gap to a great degree. Even better, the new Team Edition will now allow our healthcare providers to enhance both their practice and the care they deliver by engaging colleagues with specialized knowledge in a timely, convenient, and cost effective way.
"We see significant potential for systemic cost savings as acceptance and use of this medium continues to grow," Cheng adds. "I’d like to emphasize the 'systemic' part. We see cost benefits to the patient. Cost benefits to the healthcare provider. And cost benefits to the health plan. If patients can get care when they need it and avoid more costly interventions in the future, it helps everyone."
