Telemedicine is fuelling demand for digit-first healthcare delivery and consumer-directed healthcare payment models, both within and outside of established healthcare billing and payment limits, by blazing new trails in how patients receive care and payments flow.
In a discussion for the “Visa B2B Series: What CFOs and Treasurers Can Teach Payments About Going Digital,” David Goldhill, founder and CEO of Sesame, and Mansoor Khan, CEO of OneClinic and parent AMK Technologies, emphasized the inefficiencies of healthcare reimbursements and workarounds.
Sesame is a pure telehealth solution, whereas OneClinic is based on physical facilities with on-site telehealth capabilities that physicians may use – however, both are plagued by outdated insurance billing methods.
Goldhill stated that more doctors and providers “have consumers who pay directly for services,” noting that whether insured or uninsured, patients are being obliged to bear higher out-of-pocket expenditures for their treatment. Nonetheless, they are burdened by the same administrative and financial complexity that the insurance system imposes.”
Sesame, for example, runs similarly to “a typical online marketplace, but for healthcare services that are paid for directly by the patient and charged directly by the doctor,” he explained. “Unlike the insurance market, doctors are free to compete on pricing, care package, and service definitions.”
“We constantly criticize innovation for not working for all 325 million people 100% of the time,” Goldhill added. One of the reasons we have so little consumer-directed innovation in healthcare is because of this. The fact is that video medicine expands access to a wide range of illnesses for a wide range of individuals in ways that did not previously exist.”
