The National Center for Policy Analysis has an interesting brief on the state of Telemedicine up on it’s website as late last month. What makes it especially interesting is it’s breif little case study on a interesting healthcare company called TelaDoc.

TelaDoc is basically a members-only, phone-based, medical consultation service. Members can call the TelaDoc number and be connected with a physician 24/7. That physician in turn has access to the patient’s medical record and can use both the phone consultation and the record to make a diagnosis, and even phone a perscription to a local pharmacy. Members pay a monthly fee and then a $35 per use fee. TelaDoc has been around since at least 2002 and boasts over 1,000,000 members.

Having worked with a number of healthcare customers with Engage, I was curious about what sort of infrastructure TelaDoc might be running. It turns out that just today TelaDoc announced it would be working with Microsoft to start using Microsoft’s HealthVault Solution, so it’s great to hear they’re joining the Microsoft Healthcare family.

What TelaDoc’s new parternship makes clear is that as telemedicine grows the need for medical IT will grow as well, because there will need to be a infrastructure to support the communication, storage, and automation systems that telemedicine depends on. Of course before that can happen, the policy breif points out there are a number of legal and regulartory hurdles that must be dealt with.

What’s surprising though is that consumers seem to be very receptive to telemedicine. TelaDoc has a surprising 90%+ satisfaction rate inspite of the dearth of face to face time involved. And if consumers demand it, those regulartory hurdles might just disappear.

What do you think? Do you think telemedicine will catch on in the coming years as a viable alternative? What needs to change before that can happen?

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