Maggie Mahar of Health Beat raises two important questions about online physician visits:
Indeed, if all goes as swimmingly as online advocates claim, the ease of web consultations will lead to a spike in minor patient-doctor meetings. It’s tough to do the math this early on, but you can imagine a trend where the costs roughly even out: what patients save in avoiding in-person visits is displaced onto more frequent online visits.
Another question mark is the assumption that online consultations will replace in-person visits. I’m not so sure about this. Just as plausible is the notion that online consultation ends up making more patients pay twice: once for the Internet powwow and then again for a face-to-face visit should it be necessary. And who decides if the visit is necessary?
Since online physician visits are still a speck on the scale of medical services, we’ll have to see how it goes. But as the use of online health services care increase — as they most certainly will — these issues will have to be worked out. Yet the real question is not about more or less visits, or even — dare I say it — about lower or higher costs. No the real question is, will online physician visits contribute to better access and more cost effective health outcomes? That is the ball we must keep our eye on.
February 8, 2008 at 11:48 am
Point #1 is baloney. Basically the argument is that the built-in hassle of seeing a doctor makes it less likely you’ll go for trivial matters. But we all know people who go to their doctor for the slightest ailment, and similarly, we know people who won’t go to the doctor, even they have a real problem, because it’s such a huge pain in the ass.
My assumption is that anything that improves prevention of serious illness saves untold cost down the road. And a big part of that is improved doctor-patient communication.