Dennis Truong and Jody Crane have reinvented the traditional house call. ¶ The Kaiser Permanente doctors are responsible for the creation and implementation of a new program called HouseCalls, in which patients can schedule 20-minute appointments with physicians via video. The foray into mobile health saves the patients a visit to urgent care centers and saves those centers money, the doctors said. It’s just one new initiative underway at the national health provider aimed at improving care while lowering costs.
Crane: About eight months ago, an internal medicine doctor said they were kind of toying around with trying to connect with patients at home. They learned that it was doable, but that it required a lot of effort and time on behalf of the physician to get the patient, who might not be as tech savvy, to get the audio working, the video working and get the patient ready for the encounter.
We thought we can do this big time in our call centers. We have ER physicians working in the call center, but they were mainly supporting nurses.
Dennis and I showed up one day and we said for today we’re going to do the following: We’re going to offer patients the ability to see us real time on video. We probably saw four or five patients the first day. All the patients were thrilled we were able to handle their complaints.
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Truong: We’re basically covered in D.C., Virginia and Maryland, so we receive patients in any of those three states. Patients receive HouseCalls as an option. If they don’t have any major complaints that would require an emergency visit, these patients can be seen by us. If they get on the call and they’re still not comfortable, we always have the option to book them with their primary care doctor or book them into one of our urgent care centers.
Crane: We do know the volume is increasing over time. About a month ago, we were not marketing it at all and getting 10 calls a day. Now we’re getting 15 to 20 calls a day with some advertising to our members. Our goal is 30 calls a day.
Date: Monday, March 3