BUSINESSOnline consultation slow to growHaving patients and insurers pay for e-mail contact has run into snags, with analysts citing issues from patient reluctance to pay to privacy concerns.By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. July 12, 2004. Since 2002, First Health Group Corp., a Downers Grove, Ill.-based PPO, has stood ready to pay $25 for each online consultation physicians conduct with chronically ill patients. But the volume of online consultations has been so anemic that the PPO can do nothing but wait for patient and physician demand for the service to materialize. "Every once in a while somebody uses it," said Scott Smith, MD, the PPO's chief medical officer. "If my career was dependent on this, I'd have been out of business a long time ago." Physician resistance, concerns about medical and financial privacy, the newness of the service, lack of patient awareness of its availability and patient reluctance to pay a co-pay -- or anything -- are some of the key reasons why online consultations haven't yet taken off, according to several health plans that have been reimbursing for online consultations either on an experimental or non-experimental basis since 2002. Although recent surveys have found that most consumers want to communicate online with their physician, plans report that they have seen little evidence that patients will use the service heavily at this time. In March, for example, a survey by JupiterResearch found that a majority of adult Internet users were interested in engaging in online consultations with their physicians but only 3% of them did in 2003. A key reason is that 92% of consumers are unwilling to pay more than $10 for an online consultation, said Monique Levy, an analyst with the Darien, Conn.-based market research firm. [...]Full text of AMNews content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2004 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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