Please share your experiences with Teladoc (or similar telemedicine)

[Cirque du So-What]

My company has sent the following announcement:

We are waiving all Teladoc co-payments for the next 90 days for all virtual visits, regardless of whether the visit is related to the diagnosis or treatment of COVID-19. Teladoc provides you and your eligible dependents with 24/7/365 access to U.S. board-certified physicians. In addition to primary care physicians, Teladoc gives you access to specialists for behavioral health and dermatology.

I have not used this service previously, but it sounds good in principle.

[Zorro]

1. My wife used it the other day for the first time

It's a videochat with a doctor. She told the doc her symptoms, what she's taking, and got some recommendations. Almost like an office visit, without the hands-on part (no stethoscope, mobility checks, temp/BP/weight checks). It gave my wife some reassurance and advice for follow-up if her condition doesn't improve over the next week.

[a la izquierda]

2. I only used it in the UK and it was great.

My insurance company here in the States has set up a similar thing to what you posted.

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. I've done it for mental health care. The tech they use can be glitchy at times, but

since I am a lip reader, it is heads and shoulders over a regular phone call, which I had to do yesterday.

[Jirel]

4. My clients' experiences.

I have not used one and NEVER will, in part because of a number of my clients’ experiences.

There has not been one positive review. Most of my clients are sick and rural, and telemedicine may be their only way to see a specialist. About 50% were seeing a mental health professional that way, and the rest were getting help with specialists for physical problems that don’t generally need a lot of physical examination or testing (i.e., not cardiology, oncology, orthopedics, etc.).

One major problem shared by all I’ve witnessed so far (except the ones providing tele-service that happens at another medical provider’s physical location) has been getting medical records. Most of the at-home telemedicine services I have dealt with say they will not take record requests by 3rd parties (legal offices, other docs), even though that is illegal. When pressed, some will give a way to do it (then not provide records anyway), while others insist that only the patient can get their own records through a patient portal (whether or not they have an internet connection, computer, printer, etc. is their problem). Some provide no way to communicate with the service by phone except for the patient themselves, by providing patient account info (which is confidential and should not be shared with another medical office or legal counsel) and verifying that the caller is the patient.

To put it nicely, a lot of the docs seem to be the dregs who can’t make it in regular private practice. After trying to chase several down through NPI and other means, we found multiple short term hires by clinics within the region (with bad reviews of that doc or clinic), sometimes a history of license suspensions, or a history of opening multiple failed offices. In one case, a psychiatrist was practicing telemedicine in our state (I’d guess as a supplemental cash stream), but her real business was in California as a vegan whole-foods “medical” consultant who was promising quack cures through diet for things like lupus, seizures, and autism - please pay thousands for her online classes in “nutrition” and individual diet plans. Her “treatment” of a client both crossed (mildly) some ethical borders and landed the client in a hospitalization because of the effects of a drug that should not have been prescribed due to another condition.

After seeing just how “great” telemedicine has been for these folks... never, never, EVER.