Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance
If you want to revolutionize medicine, you need to revolutionize how everyone in medicine is paid.<p>The revolutionary technology already exists: telemedicine (TM) through live video conferencing, store & forward of image data for dermatology, radiology, or ophthalmology, home health monitoring, wearable monitoring systems, online health management systems, personal health records, genome sequencing, its all here! So what's the problem? Doctors can't get paid for any of this.<p>Despite common belief, doctors don't get paid that much, particularly doctors that work in the public setting and must deal with Medicare (and in California, MediCal) patients. If a neurologist in San Francisco sees a Medicare patient in Los Angeles through video conferencing they can't bill Medicare because LA is not a non-Metropolitan Statistical Area. No doctor wants to deal with dismal MediCal rates. There are little to no codes to bill for home-based monitoring, and if even those exist, there is no code for a specialist to diagnose remotely. We have 30 years of academic literature praising TM. So who's holding everything up?<p>We need a new insurance company that focuses on TM and monitoring technologies from the start to usher in what everyone and their mom has been describing as "preventive" healthcare. Sure, we'll still need traditional methods for surgeries and catastrophic events, but I'd pay out of pocket to be able to forward an image of a rash to a dermatologist or the back of my throat to my physician any day. Fast, instant, convenient.<p>Someone in the comments mentioned Qliance, which looks promising. I'm surprised someone in SV hasn't taken advantage of something similar there. Geeks love to be on the cutting edge, why not be the cutting edge medical patient?