Driven by faster internet connections, ubiquitous smartphones and changing insurance standards, more health providers are turning towards electronic communications — and it is upending the delivery of healthcare. Telemedicine, one of the most important fields in healthcare today, plays a key role in this shift towards a more value-based care which helps to cut costs, generate additional revenue, and enhance patient access to care and satisfaction.
Although telemedicine has experienced significant growth and adoption in the last decade and has brought about considerable changes to the healthcare industry, reimbursements for Telemedicine from both CMS and private payers are still either not available or available for certain specialties or remote locations.
Traditionally when we speak about Telemedicine, we are referring to a call or video connection between the patient and the doctor. Although there are significant advantages to using video visits to diagnose and treat common illnesses such as cough, abdominal pain, UTI and many dermatological conditions, there are also disadvantages. Many patients shy away from video visits when not feeling well, and some just don’t have access to high-speed Internet. For a provider, the most significant drawback to video or telephone visits is that the provider may spend as much time on the call/video as on an office visit, but make only a fraction of the money under the current reimbursement rules. Another challenge associated with video visits is scheduling. Patients and providers often are late for their appointments, and such delays can disrupt an entire series of scheduled video visits. Lastly, many physicians do not want to reserve a day or afternoon for telemedicine visits hoping for patients to sign up.
GenieMD, a global provider of Telemedicine and patient monitoring and engagement solutions, uniquely addresses these major challenges in Telemedicine. Their mobile-first, cloud-based plug-and-play architecture enables for rapid customization of the product and integration with hospital and clinic’s EMR, Practice Management, and other enterprise resources to make their Telemedicine product become a seamless part of the enterprise.
The vision of GenieMD is to facilitate doctor-patient communication by providing engaging and easy to use solution for patients to report their health concerns to a provider from the comfort of their home or office while allowing providers to deal with each case efficiently from any desktop or mobile device.
Unique Solutions to Prominent Problems
GenieMD makes telemedicine super-efficient by using an AI based engine to interview the patient and collect all pertinent information about their chief complaint. Additionally, GenieMD iVisit seamlessly shares patient generated data or aggregated data from disparate sources such as hospital EMRs to give the provider a holistic view of the patient health history for better diagnosis and treatment options. In most cases, the provider can diagnose and treat the patient based on this information by spending less than two minutes per case.
In cases where video offers clinical or patient satisfaction value, GenieMD iVisit offers appointment scheduling and reminders to join a secure multi-party video conference with the provider, specialist, family members or translators.
To make the encounter more efficient, GenieMD iVisit interviews the patient in advance and generates a report for the provider to review before joining the call. This reduces the length of time needed on the video call as the bulk of the visit is asking and documenting the Q/A by the provider.
For maximum efficiency, a new case falls into a central bucket and all participating providers are notified of the new pending case. Similar to Uber, the first available provider can take the case and treat the patient. This technique allows for Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants to handle most common cases relieving the doctors to spend more time on more complex cases.
Unlike the patient portals provided by EMR vendors, that contain information about that particular clinic or doctor’s visits, GenieMD’s iVisit collects data from multiple sourcescontaining patient information offering a more accurate representation of the patient health history to the provider during an episodic encounter. This becomes especially valuable when the encounter is between the patient and a doctor that is not familiar with the patient’s health history. In addition, patients can use smart Wi-Fi devices such as glucometers, blood pressure devices, and scales to collect and share trends of vitals instead of a singular measurement that can be off for a variety of reasons. Patient generated information is clearly marked so providers can place proper considerations on the accuracy of the readings.
In addition of making the service available on all brands of mobile devices and multiple browser and operating systems, GenieMD iVisit can also be accessed through voice activated devices such as Amazon Alexa. This further lowers the barrier for the utilization while making the interaction more engaging for the patient.
Post Encounter
So what happens after the episodic encounter is over? GenieMD iVisit can optionally create an encounter and save the information in the provider EMR. Patient related information such as medication prescribed, care plan and any educational material provided by the physician is made available to the patient through GenieMD iVisit.
The Visionary
Dr. Soheil Saadat, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of GenieMD, is responsible for charting the company’s global course. He founded GenieMD in 2012 with more than 25 years of technology and executive management experience. In 2005, he founded Prodiance Corporation (Acquired by Microsoft), a global leader in Enterprise Risk Management Solutions. Prior to Prodiance he founded Scientific Software, Inc., (SSI) (Acquired by Agilent Technologies). Under his direction, SSI became a world leader in the chromatography and scientific data management markets, with its products deployed in the top pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Soheil is passionate about using technology to solve real life problems. He enjoys mentoring young entrepreneurs and has been an active investor and serves on the Board of a number of software startups in Silicon Valley. His philanthropic focus is providing opportunities for the youth to achieve their fullest potential through educational assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.