Doctor-founded company a phone-only practice

TelaDoc says it will treat minor ailments without seeing patients, raising some ethical eyebrows.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. May 23/30, 2005.

TelaDoc Medical Services Inc. has assembled a network of physicians around the country to offer telephone treatment for minor, nonurgent problems of patients the doctors have never seen in person.

The Dallas-based company, which officially launched its 24-hour telephone-based consultation service in April, involves two separate but affiliated for-profit entities incorporated in Texas, said Michael Gorton, TelaDoc's CEO. One is TelaDoc Medical Services, a patient-membership entity co-founded in 2002 by Gorton and two family physicians -- G. Byron Brooks, MD, of Seabrook, Texas, and Bruce Begia, MD, of San Antonio. The other is TelaDoc Physicians Assn., which provides the telephone consultations.

TelaDoc is the only company in the country focused solely on offering telephone medical consultations, its executives said.

To access the service, patients must first join the membership entity by registering and filling out a medical history online. That history, which doctors access when they are on the phone with patients, establishes a patient-physician relationship and makes members eligible to be treated by a doctor licensed to practice in the state where the member resides, said Robert Kramer, MD, TelaDoc's chief medical officer.

While not commenting specifically about TelaDoc, Michael Goldrich, MD, chair of the AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, said that "from an ethics point of view physicians need to meet a standard of care relevant to their specialty when they work at a distance."