If you are a regular reader here you know I have posted several articles about the big investment United has made with Cisco systems and a few other videos as well The link below was from an article from about this time last year. It kind of keeps us in check as to what is going on with both the technology and people side of the business at the same time. This is where some of your health insurance premium money goes so it’s good to be informed.
Update Cisco Lays Off Hundreds - UnitedHealth To Spend Tens of Million of Dollars with Cisco to Build Nationwide Telehealth Network –
With all the investments that are flying around it might make one ponder this:
Are You Insured by a Technology or Insurance Company – UnitedHealthCare
Here is a news announcement from last year that ran on Fox. As I understand the company is looking for doctors to sign up all over the country to field calls during their off hours and have the opportunity to earn extra money with some of the telehealth services they offer. The post below has some additional details on how the entire teleheatlh visit works with the doctors.
OptumHealth (Subsidiary of UnitedHealthCare) Teams Up With American Well for 24/7 Physician Consults (quote from the link below)
“There’s a lot there and it takes a while to watch, but if you have the time it will discuss and focus on how physicians can save money and learn about using the “business intelligence” they have to offer, how you can analyze community statistics and be a better doctor for your community. We see this happening everywhere, hospitals, etc. all pushing business intelligence down to the already over burdened doctor to analyze and help become cost effective, so this is nothing new here.
Through having all this information to analyze the hopes are to save money and create better decision making processes, if it doesn’t end up muddying the water too much in the process, as a physician may be members of more than one health plan, so to keep up with 4 or 5 of these, which is not uncommon here in California, it could end up being overkill, unless you put all your eggs in one basket, but nobody does that.”
Doctor’s need to be onboard and be approved and there’s one other goodie that comes along with this for doctors and that is the “business intelligence” that will tell practices what they need to do to have a better practice and they will want to run some algorithms and have you reporting in for evaluations. This is what one doctor told me when he inquired so he was not ready for the constant monitoring and reporting himself. Now they may have other specific contracts set up to where patients are seeing their specific physician too and within the last few months, again based on contracts perhaps some of this as evolved.
Here’s the big van they drive around to demonstrate and a couple of their executives answering questions.
I have a few more posts on the blog which you can search and find if you like. At any rate this is another video that shows what a telehealth visit would look like and how the trailers set up to see patients would work. BD
UnitedHealth is partnering with Cisco Technologies to develop Connected Care, the first national telemedicine network. Using homemade software and Cisco video conferencing equipment, the company, the nation’s largest private insurer, hopes to use its size and scale to sell doctor groups and employers its telemedicine technology and services.
UnitedHealth bets big on building national telemedicine network « MedCity News