Medem announces online consultation service

The company owned by the AMA and medical societies launches an option under which doctors can get paid for answering e-mailed questions from patients.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. July 8/15, 2002.

Medem Inc. has launched a service that lets doctors get paid for doing online visits with their patients through a secure electronic mail network that the company operates.

Under the service, which was announced during the AMA's Annual Meeting, patients can submit clinical questions involving nonurgent matters to their physicians.

Physicians, not Medem, set the fee for the online consultation service, said Edward Fotsch, MD, CEO of the San Francisco-based Internet health care company, owned by the American Medical Association and other medical societies.

Dr. Fotsch reported at the Annual Meeting that a Medem survey indicates that most physicians planning to offer the online service expect to use the level of their patients' co-payments for an office visit as a baseline, meaning that they will charge $20 to $30 for an online consultation.

Medem believes that doctors will be receptive to doing online consultations because the service will help them earn a better living and get paid for some work they already do over the telephone for which they aren't paid.

It is up to the physician to decide whether to charge the patient for an online consultation, Dr. Fotsch said.

The company's research shows that primary care physicians expect to do five to 10 online consultations per week. If a physician does 10 consultations a week at $25 each, he or she would earn more than $10,000 a year. [...]