A physician who makes house calls may seem retro and quaint, but thanks to innovations in information technology, doctors can redefine the way healthcare is delivered.

Hello Health a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based practice still provides patients with old-fashioned house calls, using 21st century technology, such as video chat.

Hello Health is set to launch a social networking platform, modeled after sites like Facebook, in the next couple of months, and will allow physicians to communicate with their patients using e-mail, IM, video chat and text messaging.

“The platform takes all the ways we currently use to communicate and applies it to healthcare,” says Jay Parkinson, MD, founder of Hello Health.

Parkinson says 1,100 doctors have already expressed interest in the platform. Things are not good right now for primary care doctors, and they are looking for a way out – this could be it, he says.

C. Gresham Bayne, MD, executive medical director of the Call Doctor Medical Group based in San Diego, was looking for a way out when he started his practice.

Bayne’s practice still sees patients in their homes, but does it without the overhead of maintaining a physical office. The practice employs five physicians and five physician assistants, who equipped with tablet PCs, make 7.2 house calls each day, and serve 700 patients with an average age of  82.

Bayne is also the co-founder and chairman of Janus Health, a provider of a mobile patient management system designed for house-call practitioners.

Janus Health provides physicians with centralized remote access to the patient’s complete medical records and history, and functions both offline and online so patients are treated independent of Internet connectivity.
Bayne believes there is going to be a huge shift in the way healthcare is delivered.

“We have to get doctors out of the office and on the road and now the technology exists to do it well,” he says.  “We can’t do what we need to do without a massive expansion of Janus-like services, but right now we are the only one doing this.”  

Last year the Independence at Home Act was introduced by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to create incentives for providing patients with care options that offer greater independence and quality of life, but it never saw action. Bayne says the bill is due to be re-introduced and is hopeful that this will mean a change to the system.

Alan Kronhaus, MD, co-founder and CEO of Doctors Making Housecalls based in Chapel Hill, N.C., a practice geared to complex, elderly patients who are essentially homebound, has managed to make house calls and have a physical office.

“Our vision from the start was to have a practice that operates as a geographically dispersed group practice. To realize that vision we had to be completely electronic and Internet-based,” says Kronhaus.

Physicians in the practice carry laptops to review lab results, schedule appointments, take clinical encounter notes, make consults and do orders as well as for documenting in real-time.

“It makes all the difference clinically to see patients in their own environment,” says Kronhaus. “We are able to glean a tremendous amount of clinical information. There is no doubt about it.”