In the various states of America, most patients suffer from having the proper health care and from the long postponed doctor appointments.
The American Well organization has created NowClinic to be used by OptumHealth which is a part from UnitedHealth Group.
NowClinic service will offer a service for the patients to meet the physicians through the video conference and this service will begin in Texas. This technological system will ease the crowded appointments and it will solve the problems of insurance.
This newborn nationwide system meet with some controversy from particular physicians such as David Himmelstein, a primary care doctor and associate professor at Harvard Medical School consider NowClinic will ignore the usual items of patients’ examination like the direct contact.
Hawaii Medical Association opposed the legalization of the law which allows the patients and the doctors to have a relation online. According to Texas law, the online relation between the doctor and the patient should be preceded by direct examination and because the NowClinic service will start working in Texas it needs legalization from the lawmakers of this state. Mari Robinson, executive director of Texas Medical Board consider this virtual visit technique is not suitable according to their laws.
Christopher Crow, a family physician in Plano, Tex., who is responsible for the NowClinic system during its test, declared that this new service will help the physicians to know the specific details of the patients’ diseases.
Rashid Bashshur, director of telemedicine at the University of Michigan explained that this resistance for this new online examination is due to the fear from the change and he also mentions that this system will treat the patients who do not have medical insurance and it is less expensive.
In Texas itself which this new system will begin working from, 70% of patients do not have their particular doctors and about 79% of emergency room visits have problems of crowded appointments.
NowClinic system will help the doctors in knowing their patients’ medical history and in writing the prescription in minutes, the appointment itself will not take more than ten minutes. It will also afford the mental health care for military members in cooperation with TriWest Healthcare Alliance. A recent study is made by Harvard team at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center includes the acceptance of most patients to this new technology and this predict that this new examination will take the place of the old one.
NY times
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