Altering Doctor-Patient Relationship With Telehealth
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- December 06, 2022
When most people look at telehealth, Kirsty Garrett says they fail to understand how it has fundamentally transformed the balance of power in the health industry.
Under the old model of doctors ensconced in their rooms, patients had to queue, and the appointment was at the doctor’s convenience, with the patient fitting in.
With telehealth, says Garrett, the model is entirely “patient-driven.”
“The patient is the one who decides how they want to engage, be it on a table, mobile phone, or laptop,” she says.
“And with telehealth, the patient initiates the appointment, and they can see a doctor within 30 minutes.”
Garrett is the chief executive of Doctors on Demand, one of the leading Australian telehealth providers.
The business was founded in 2015 by two pharmacists in Queensland who saw firsthand the struggles patients had just to get time with doctors.
Filling a need
In some regional areas of Australia, there are very few General Practitioners, and many towns have lost their GPs. For people living in these regional centers, the option is to drive extensive distances to queue for the doctor in towns fortunate enough to have one or go without a consultation.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic of 2019 catapulted telehealth forward, Doctors on Demand was filling a significant need in Australian healthcare.
The pandemic, however, was the “watershed moment” that proved telehealth is a “legitimate viable and safe option” to be rolled out at scale.
“There’s a saying that you never let a good crisis go to waste,” says Garrett.
“We were ready and scaled with our technology platform before Covid hit, so we were able to turn on a dime.”
Originally, Doctors on Demand was able to build some scale by providing services to international students insured with global provider Allianz.
The vast majority of these students left Australia during the pandemic. Doctors on Demand then serviced the wider population when the Government extended its Medicare insurance coverage to telehealth during the pandemic.
That has since been withdrawn, but Doctors on Demand now has momentum driven by convenience and an attractive pricing model.
Garrett says that the company was doing around 17,000 consultations each month. In January 2019, they were doing only around 25 consultations a day.
Opportunity for growth
Born in the cloud and leveraging Microsoft Azure, Garrett sees further technology development as the future for Doctors on Demand and the key to its growth.
In 2019, 29% of all GP consultations in Australia were through telehealth, which gives a significant growth opportunity to boost that to 30% and beyond as more people become comfortable with the remote channel.
Also, Garrett says there can be an increase in the type of services doctors can deliver remotely.
She says GPs can remotely deliver around 75% of the services a doctor can provide in a one-on-one physical appointment.
The further leveraging of technology, she says, could push that percentage out to 85%, creating another growth opportunity.
One example of the way forward is a partnership with another health tech company, ResApp, which has created a downloadable app to help diagnose and manage respiratory disease using only a smartphone.
“We were ready and scaled with our technology platform before Covid hit, so we were able to turn on a dime”
Patients download the app and share the data with the GP via a link. The GP can then analyze the results, diagnose, and prescribe a suitable treatment.
Garrett says that the bulk of GP consultations is in areas such as ear, nose, throat, and skin conditions, and there are more opportunities to use apps and video to share data and make diagnoses in these areas.
The other growth path is through employers, many of whom are responding to the battle for talent by expanding the range of employee benefits.
“Put that with the move to the hybrid workforce, with many people still wanting to work from home, and telehealth as an additional benefit has some potential as another factor to attract employees,” says Garrett.
Telehealth has already had a transformational impact on Australian healthcare, and the moment is only moving one way.
The transformation, however, needs companies offering transformational solutions, and Doctors on Demand is meeting that need.
Created in the cloud, it has the agility to innovate, scale, and respond while driving an expanded offering in a market where demand is growing, and doctors continue to be scarce.
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Liubomyr Vorona