This Company Is Making Texting With Your Doctor the New Normal

Sometimes, the stats just represent themselves. “We know that 98 percent of patients will read a text message, and 90 percent of these patients will see that text message within three minutes,” says Ethan Bechtel, founding father of telehealth startup OhMD. “When you compare that to email, which is read 20 percent of the time, or a patient portal message, which is read 7 percent of the time, you quickly realize there's literally no other thanks to do that at scale.”

When Bechtel says “this,” he’s pertaining to the desperate battle that healthcare workers across the world are waging against the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis. one among the foremost essential ways in which doctors can slow the pandemic is by communicating with patients from afar, so this is often a flash tailor-made for OhMD. The Vermont-based company offers medical providers a HIPAA-compliant communication platform, centered around texting, which they’re now making liberal to hospitals and medical practices across the state .

A time to text

“Texting is such a crucial technology to leverage immediately , because it doesn't require that two people get on the phone at the precise same time to share information,” Bechtel says. “You can send a message bent 10,000 patients at an equivalent time and make certain that 90 percent of them are getting to read it. you'll say, ‘Hey, if you've got X, Y and Z symptoms, this is often where you would like to travel for the testing facility. don't attend the ER. don't attend your family practitioner.’ we've clients altogether 50 states, and therefore the number of text messages being sent through the platform has tripled within the last week. Everything changed overnight.”

Until now, telehealth companies are relative newbies within the glacially evolving landscape of healthcare, and their biggest challenge has been getting covered by insurance companies. But on St Patrick's Day , Medicare announced it might be covering telehealth services for an unspecified period of time . “Medicare just set the bar for reimbursement for telehealth during a massive way,” Bechtel says. “It would have taken a decade. Before this i think the estimates were that telemedicine was getting to be a $64 billion industry by 2025, but i might assume that number is not any longer relevant because everything has changed. this is often getting to be the first means of communicating and conducting a visit within the coming months, and that i don't think that genie gets replace within the bottle.”

Bittersweet boost for business

Like many of us working in industries unexpectedly benefited by the crisis, Bechtel says he has mixed feelings about this being a take-off moment for OhMD. “What I feel is an indoor struggle over the planet being ablaze and us being here, solving a crucial problem. It’s an honest thing for our company and it is a good thing for patients, and we're helping doctors save lives, end of story. But it's just hard to reconcile that with, I guess, the sheer size of this catastrophe.”

In a sense, Bechtel has been preparing for this his whole life. Healthtech won't be the primary industry that involves mind when someone says, “My family has been within the business for generations” — but as a child growing up in Burlington, Vt., within the ’90s, Bechtel spent weekends helping out at his mom’s company. She was an orthopedic NP turned X-ray tech who got her MBA then started a business that provided financial services software to medical practices.

After college he began working for the closed corporation and honed in on electronic medical records. He quickly understood that one among the best challenges for online medical portals was communicating with patients, and that’s how the thought for OhMD was born. In 2014 Bechtel took OhMD to the NYC healthtech accelerator Blueprint Health, and in 2016 he got funding from Burlington-based healthtech company IDX Solutions, which helped him make the choice to headquarter his business back home.

Tracking an epidemic and fast-tracking telehealth adoption

Bechtel says that OhMD was closely following the coronavirus spread in China in early January, and his team began working overtime to fast-track a video function they’d planned to release later this year. In early March they began to listen to from physicians in several states that OhMD was getting used to triage patients before bringing them into the office. At that time , they realized how useful their services might be for this moment and decided to form the platform free or subsidized for as many practices as that they had the bandwidth to assist .

“Offering free features has always been a part of our DNA, but immediately stakes are much above they've ever been,” Bechtel says. “So while there is a cost to offering free texting features for practices, we believe it's our responsibility in touch as many of these costs as possible.”

Bechtel hopes that the distant blue during this storm are going to be the ever present adoption of telehealth services, which he believes will play into the evolution toward a healthcare system that's ultimately more sustainable and effective. “As time goes on, more and more doctors are going to be reimbursed supported how healthy their patients are, versus what percentage patients they see. Because at the top of the day, this is often all about outcomes,” Bechtel says. “How can we cause you to healthier? Healthcare may be a very slow-moving system with many various stakeholders. But this is often an inflection point for variety folks during this space. and that i think if there is a bright side at the top of all of this, it’s that in 12 months, we're getting to reminisce and wonder why it took an epidemic to force us to use technology that really improves patient care and access.”