South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
MDLive takes its virtual visits to new level
Company to incorporate automation, artificial intelligence
Sunrise-based MDLive already offers virtual health care, connecting patients with doctors 24 hours a day, seven days a week, via mobile app, online video, or phone.
But now, MDLive is taking its virtual service to the next level by incorporating automation and artificial intelligence: Meet “Sophie,” MDLive’s interactive chatbot, which is designed to ask patients about their symptoms and guide them through online registration for their virtual visit.
The idea is for Sophie to collect patient information and relay it to a physician for review and followup by phone or video chat, freeing the doctor from that part of the process.
“When the doctor is spending time with you, she is focusing on more empathizing and educating and making sure the diagnosis is right vs. collecting history and asking questions,” said Rich Berner, CEO of MDLive.
Sophie asks questions based on patients’ health concerns, and is designed to continually learn from its interviews of patients to perform more accurate diagnoses and suggested treatments, according to the company. Soon, Sophie will also be scheduling appointments and helping members do cost comparisons.
Artificial intelligence is expected to change health care as we know it. In a recent article, Forbes magazine pointed to the many examples of AI-powered technologies: performing radiology scans; identifying tumors and tracking the spread of cancer; detecting eye conditions using retinal imaging; flagging dangerously abnormal potassium levels; and assisting with diagnosing — or even predicting disease.
Berner said he joined MDLive in January because he thinks telehealth “represents the first real opportunity to disrupt health care and make it better for the clinician, better for the patient, and to lower the cost of health care across the whole country.”
Berner sees virtual health care as especially attractive to millennials and younger generations. “They’re growing up operating on their phone and frankly that’s how they prefer to interact with a clinician. Some don’t even want to see the clinician, they’d rather do text therapy,” he said.
MDLive has about 30 million consumers who have enrolled as members, and in May, reached the milestone of providing 1 million virtual visits. The private company has doubled its revenues over the last year, Berner said.
This year, MDLive expects to do 500,000 virtual visits. Patients can sign up directly online for MDLive, or through their health insurer if it offers the service.
MDLive has more than
1,200 board-certified clinicians, some full-time and some contractors, who connect with patients over the phone, app or video chat.
Signing up online for MDLive is free. The cost of a general virtual doctor’s visit without health insurance is
$75. A psychiatry consultation is $259 for the initial appointment, and $99 for each followup. For a dermatology consultation, the cost is $69 per consultation.
With health insurance, virtual consultations are often free, or require a copay, Berner said.
There has been industrywide concern about a shortage of doctors, especially in primary care, as many in the baby boomer generation are retiring. But Berner said MDLive’s belief is “there’s not a shortage of doctors, there’s a shortage of using doctors efficiently.”
He said physicians end up spending time on routine health issues such as sore throats, runny noses and pink eye. “Much of that care can be automated,” Berner said.
Ultimately, he said, “Sophie can help doctors see more patients.”
“In the future, Sophie can remind you to take medication. If you step on the electronic scale and you’ve gained a lot of weight and you’re a congestive heart failure patient, she may connect you to your care coordinator,” Berner said.
More employers are offering health benefits to workers that include virtual doctor visits, according to a 2018 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which monitors U.S. health care. Kaiser found that more than threequarters of large companies offer employees insurance that covers telehealth, up from 27 percent three years ago.
But Matthew Rae, senior health policy analyst for San Francisco-based health policy analyst Kaiser Family Foundation, said the survey showed that employees have been slow to enroll in telehealth services. “People are really used to seeing the doctor,” he said.
Still, some employers are making inroads by encouraging workers to try telehealth through financial incentives, such as lower copays or deductibles, Rae said.
Rae said it’s still unknown how much of a cost savings telehealth will be for employers trying to trim their health-care bills. “They can deliver doctor visits for less money, but it may result in more visits,” he said.
Meanwhile, health insurers are getting on-board with telehealth with the goal of lowering their costs and improving accessibility for customers. They’re also putting money into the industry.
Cigna and Health Care Service Corp., parent to five Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans around the country, in August participated in a $50 million financing round for MDLive, led by San Francisco-based
Health Velocity Capital.
Julie McCarter, vice president of product solutions for Cigna, said the insurer has had a five-year relationship with MDLive, and now offers the telehealth service to all its customers. About
100,000 customers are enrolled in MDLive, she said.
She said Cigna studied
20,000 patients from 2014 to
2016 who used MDLive compared with 20,000 patients of similar demographics who did not, and found 17 percent lower medical costs and a 36 percent reduction in ER use.
McCarter sees the partnership growing. “What we’re excited about is expanding into wellness and prevention, and possibly chronic care management,” she said.