Physician-Patient Virtual Visits Part 2

In a prior post, the Disease Management Care Blog touched on the topic of 'virtual visits.' Check out this report from Spain. Teens are using Second Life to access health care advice. Wow.

The DMCB remains a fan of virtual visits. It suspects that in this instance, the physicians are already fairly compensated or, even better, providing the service as a public service. This looks reasonably user friendly. It may be one approach to health care disparities but IT access would be a barrier in the U.S. The visits are appropriately limited to a single topic area, making formal IT-based decision support & teaming less necessary. The lack of formal links to a medical record is what is sought by the users (obviously), which is not unheard of in this corner of public health. If this grows, expect ongoing studies to help us better understand its value.

Maybe the value proposition could be extended to chronic illness. As this evolves, the DMCB is really looking forward to seeing how Linden dollar fee-for-service or capitation would work. The spouse thinks her physician-husband should consider it when we have a Linden mortgage for the roof over our heads or can live off of Linden groceries.