Closing the Gaps in Telehealth

In this episode of Healthcare Goes Digital, Anthony Capone, President of DocGo, sat down with me to share how his company uses last-mile mobile health services and integrated medical transportation solutions to make healthcare more accessible for everyone, including underserved populations.

Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:

Q: There’s a lot of discussion about not enough health care spaces and the home becoming the new hospital. How do you see technology evolving and then utilizing people like at DocGo being able to service, if you will, people within their homes? What does that gonna look like in the future?

A: I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment that you started with there, which is that it used to be that healthcare was personalized with a physician that went into your home. It was taken out of the home and moved into large institutions like hospital systems, not because it was better clinically, but because it was more efficient. They’re just simply doctors ended up making more. There are fewer of them relative to the growing population, and so it just wasn’t practical that doctors going to the home relative to the cost. It was a cost reason, not quality reason.

We, DocGo, I believe, have the ability to get back to that precise, concise, tailored model of health care to you that goes into your home or goes to your office, or goes to your homeless shelter, or your woman shelter, meet you on the curb, whatever it might be. We’re a healthcare that is tailored to you and solving the problem of that really extreme high cost when it comes to a doctor visiting you on site because of our clinical care delivery model.

We’re kind of going back in time, if you will, to the way healthcare was originally developed. But now we’re layering on this technology which allows for not only all that real-time transparency and the routing and efficiency, but when our lower level clinician is physically on-site. They have a large ipad pro that is connected, then live with all of our remote diagnostic equipment that has high-resolution, medical-grade cameras. They’re looking in your ears, looking in your throat, in your eyes, looking at your skin. They have with them all of the diagnostics for doing all of your EKG, as an example. They could do point-of-care to test and read back there.

Let’s say you call us and say, “Oh, my child has a throat irritation.” We show up, the physician assistant tells our LPN, “I need you to take the camera with the tongue depressor and look down the back of the throat. Oh, there are some white specks. I’d like you to run a test. The LPN takes a throat culture, puts that into our machine, and then very shortly thereafter is able to say, “Your child has strep.” Then right after that, our physician assistant writes a script for antibiotics that goes to the pharmacy kiosk, a little box, that’s in the back part of the SUV of the LPN. They walk out to their car, out pops the script for the antibiotics, and maybe steroids, depending on how severe it is. Then they go back in the home, and they give to the parent the antibiotics for her kid.

So, all in one place to be having the ability to do the diagnostic, the assessment, and the treatment, all-in-one, maybe 30 or 40 minutes span, and we’re able to do that at a cost that is substantially lower than going to an emergency room, and even lower than going to an urgent care. So, convenience and costs are both better…

For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Anthony Capone, or listen to the podcast version, below.

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