Roy Schoenberg, MD
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ACCORDING TO DELOITTE'S 2008 survey of healthcare consumers, two out of three consumers want to use their doctor's Web site
to get information about health conditions or treatments; 61% of consumers want tools that would provide personalized recommendations
to improve their health, and 55% are interested in tools that would help them assess, monitor or manage their health. Interestingly,
12% of these consumers would pay extra for these tools.
Roy Schoenberg, MD, CEO of American Well Systems, is well acquainted with healthcare consumers' growing interest in online
tools. Dr. Schoenberg is the inventor of the company's online health marketplace concept, which debuted in June. He previously
founded CareKey Inc., and led the software vendor through the introduction and adoption of its Web-based health management
solutions by more than 35 million users.
Dr. Schoenberg believes that there are benefits associated with online physician visits and drawbacks of not implementing
them.
Q. Who's driving this push for online consumption of healthcare services?
At a glance
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A. You would think that consumers impact service consumption, but until recently consumers were not the ones who were generating
consumption of services. You, as a patient, would go in, and the providers of healthcare services would be the ones that would
govern how consumption would follow. They would refer you. They would prescribe. They would define the follow up and the level
of care that was appropriate for you. Consumers had very little to say about this. Now, health plans realize that consumer
involvement may change dramatically how healthcare services are being consumed; that the way to do that is to introduce interactive
tools that will reach consumers where they live. That will dramatically impact both medical cost savings as well as administrative
costs for health plans. It is a very radical shift in health plans' perspective about how to control care consumption. It's
no longer the gatekeeper—the primary care physician—that the health plans have been developing relationships with for so many
years. It is now the actual consumer that can be impacted, and online tools are probably the lowest hanging fruit.
Q. Does that mean we can expect to see health plans play a greater role in the care equation?
A. They are already beginning the shift from the position that they had for the last 20 years, in which they were literally the
after-the-fact payer. It's not a philanthropic thing. They really believe that if they become care partners with the consumers,
they can impact how the consumers are presenting themselves to consume services, and that of course, will impact what they
need to pay at the end of the day.
More importantly, for them to reap the benefit of [consumer involvement], they need to make one significant change: They need
to become a visible entity at the point of care where they traditionally weren't. They need to become physically present.
If they're aiming to appropriate care, they need to be present at the point of care. Now, that doesn't mean that they need
to become a delivery entity, but they need to become more of a facilitator of the actual interaction. When they're there,
they can impact what happens in that instance much more broadly than they could until today.
Q. Do online physician visits enable health plans to become the facilitator?
A. They become the facilitators because for their membership and their providers to come together, they have pretty much the
natural role of being the platform of that meeting. They have the membership, and they have the providers, and the brokering
of whatever happens between them can only be made by the health plan. So yes, I think they consider online or electronic visits
to be the natural platform for bringing their two biggest assets together and controlling what happens in between.
