Walgreens & MDLive Get Together for Telemedicine Push

By Steve Anderson
Contributing TMCnet Writer

It's well-known by now that telemedicine—the point where telecommunications and medicine coincide—has some significant potential to change the way we both seek and receive healthcare as we know it. But the specific developments within the field have proven to offer plenty of exciting conclusions and potential for expansion, and one new development comes from the combined efforts of Walgreens and MDLive, which will open up the telemedicine concept to Walgreens customers and connect same with doctors regardless of the hour.

The early stages of this development will see the service launched in just two trial markets, those of California and, oddly enough, Michigan. But Walgreens won't be leaving its other customers in the cold for long, as additional markets and states will get access to the service “over time.” Essentially, customers will pay $49, or less depending on the provisions of a health insurance plan, for access to a “virtual visit” with a doctor. This actually builds on Walgreens' earlier development of a “pharmacy chat” program that offered up access to pharmacists and similar staff on a 24 hour a day basis.

Basically, this is a program that has a lot of win-win to it. While clearly, not every problem can be addressed from a kiosk visit or even from a home Internet connection, this does allow those who have a hard time finding a doctor in-network to do so with clear rapidity. As described by MDLive president and chief executive officer Randy Parker, with this combination, a drugstore's customers and mobile app users can now easily access not only a board-certified doctor, but also one that can prescribe medication as needed directly from an online video platform that's both easy to access and secure to use. Meanwhile, Walgreens' chief medical officer, Dr. Harry Leider, recently offered up an interview at the 2014 Forbes Healthcare Summit in which he detailed how Walgreens was making a push to the telemedicine space, allowing the company to bring “...this idea of convenience into the digital space.”

This isn't the first time we've seen such things come about. Xerox was spotted investing in the HealthSpot kiosk platform just a couple weeks ago, and the push has been on in a general fashion to get doctors better connected to online alternatives, which not only provides more access for users but also allows doctors and hospitals alike to lower property and plant expenses. If a doctor's office worked online a couple days a week, that might be a couple days in a week in which the building didn't need to be heated quite so much, not so many lights needed to be on, less water was used and so on, resulting in not only greater accessibility for the patients but also savings for the doctor and hospital who put it to work. There's a lot of room for savings when it comes to medicine, and the more that savings can be brought into the system, the more accessible it becomes by extension. When most anyone can afford a visit to a doctor, the system is much more accessible than the alternative.

There are still plenty of details that need to be worked out before a system like this can go into wide operation, but the farther along we go toward this particular goal, the more likely we are to see a system in which healthcare is not only inexpensive, but also much more readily available.