Read about the trials of Benjamin Brewer: “At Brewer’s office the technical end works as promised, but patients don’t really seem interested. They don’t want to pay the (usually unreimbursed) $30 for the online visit with Brewer, and they’s rather just send a regular email, even though it’s vulnerable to snooping.”
Couple of reasons for this. First off, the majority of Medicare-aged patients will be uncomfortable with e-visits. Secondly, $30 is priced too high for an online consult. That’s higher than most co-pays. From my experience at MedHelp, $15 is the sweet spot.
E-visits primarily appeal to patients in their 20’s and 30’s, who grew up on instant messaging. Precisely the market Jay Parkinson is targeting.
Methinks that Dr. Brewer is simply ahead of his time. The e-visit model will take off in about 10-20 years.
Related posts:
- Are Drug Rep Visits Costing You Thousands Every Year?
- E-mails and telephone calls to the doctor cut down on patient office visits
- The Medicare cuts are coming
- The economy and doctor’s visits
- Perfection is expensive
- Needless ER visits
- How increasing payments for office visits can help specialists
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Interesting pod cast link. It may be also that the web site needs to be ‘tuned’ for search engines to locate it and place it high in the list. I don’t know how expensive it is but you can pay Google to list it in one of the top five or ten.
You are right about ‘newbies’, older folks who are not all that comfortable on the WWW. It is for the teens to 30 somethings.
I will make some comments about this on my blog, healthtrainexpress later today
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