How can you trust the health care or advice that you receive online?
In this episode of Bite the Orange, Manny talks with Geoffrey W. Rutledge, co-founder and chief medical officer at HealthTap, about how this digital platform can bring trustworthy answers to any medical question, delivering high-quality virtual primary care. HealthTap is an interactive platform that has a library of millions of peer-reviewed medical answers anyone can access for free and a virtual primary care clinic that is affordable at one’s convenience. Dr. Geoff breaks down HealthTap’s business model with a subscription fee to the service and copays for visits that are $39 or less. This is a great, sustainable option for patients needing urgent care or those with chronic conditions who require continuous treatment. He explains the benefits of building their own platform and how they collaborate with affiliated doctors.
Tune in to learn how HealthTap uses its technology and the community around it to deliver better care!
FULL EPISODE
BTO_Geoffrey W. Rutledge: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
BTO_Geoffrey W. Rutledge: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Welcome to Bite the Orange. Through our conversations, we create a roadmap for the future of health with the most impactful leaders in the space. This is your host, Dr. Manny Fombu. Let's make the future of healthcare a reality together.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night. Dear listeners, welcome to another episode of Bite the Orange. And today we have a very special guest, someone with a very unique background and someone with lots of experience in innovating in healthcare and definitely someone that deserves the right to be on Bite the Orange podcast. I'm hoping today we learn a lot from him. This is no other than Dr. Geoff Rutledge. Welcome to the show, Dr. Geoff.
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Well, thank you. Dr. Fombu, if I may call you Manny. I'm glad to meet you.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Of course, thank you. I'll do the intro. I am Manny, you're Geoff, so we have a conversation here. So we have several audience members that might know you and some might not know you, but we'd love to hear your background. So what's your story? How did you end up where you are today?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Well, I'm chief medical officer at HealthTap. My background is as a clinician, actually double board certified in internal and emergency medicine, and originally started my career in academia on faculty at Stanford and then Harvard. I decided early on in my career that even though my focus was on clinical medicine, I really appreciate the art and the skills associated with what it means to be a physician taking care of patients, recognizing that there was this amazing opportunity to use technology to improve the way we deliver care. So I went and did a PhD at Stanford in Medical Computer Science with the view of really getting a foundation that would allow me to help guide, build and guide solutions that would improve healthcare. My original research done at Harvard involved complex, automated, AI-driven solutions to support care in the critical care unit. When I came to the realization that there was a much broader and more important opportunity to use technology to improve care broadly for everyone, not just in the unique high-end medical centers, but rather that the foundations of care could be improved. And this thing called the Internet, which was new early in my career, was really the foundation of, first, the realization that we could use the Internet to improve communications and that delivering healthcare really is foundational based on communications, it's information that doctors need to do a better job, and communication with their patients required to deliver care, and so my entire career since then has really been focused on building solutions that would make healthcare better. It was a little over ten years ago when we realized that healthcare needed to be available on mobile devices. We started HealthTap a little more than 12 years ago now, with the realization that there was an opportunity to bring healthcare to mobile devices. I mean, even back then, you could do your banking on your iPhone or your Android, but you couldn't do healthcare. And we set systematically about to build a system that would allow the delivery of high-quality and effective healthcare through mobile devices. And as a physician who cares deeply about how physicians give care and what it means to be a physician and what's required to support physicians to enable them to deliver healthcare, I reached out and engaged doctors to help us in this effort, inviting doctors to join our platform. Initially, we asked people, we asked doctors to answer patients' questions, and we did something at scale that was really quite remarkable at the time, which was not pay the doctors and not charge the patients, the people using our service to ask questions, and we got many tens of thousands of doctors to participate with us helping people by directly using their knowledge to answer questions, and that was the foundation. We, of course, have moved on from there to extend what the platform does to what we have today, which is a broadly integrated platform that allows doctors to deliver care virtually to their patients. Starting a little over a year ago, we moved from the urgent care, digital urgent care model, which is kind of what most of the other telemedicine companies do, where you need a doctor right now, any doctor will do, I'll see a doctor, I'll get my problem, my itch scratched, if you will, to a model where doctors are able to actually be real doctors, taking care of their patients. We call it the virtual primary care clinic, where doctors meet their patients and have extended the time to get to know their patients and then see their patients and follow up, which is rather exciting because doctors are able to connect with patients in ways that are actually can be hard to do in the office when you have real-time pressure and a lot of other things happening simultaneously that have constricted the ability of doctors to spend quality time with their patients. So our patients are responding very positively with the idea, with the fact that when they connect with their doctors, their doctors listen to them, and they have time to actually discuss important medical issues and get the care that they need from the doctors. And of course, the doctors are responding with the same kind of thrilling excitement because they're getting to be real doctors again with less pressure and more opportunity to connect with people who want to connect with them, and it's been really, truly wonderful experience to see how effective doctors are able to be in the virtual-only setting.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite fascinating what you're saying. So a lot of people in general, if you talk about telemedicine, people focus a lot more on the technology piece of it, right? But I miss that whole value add, right, for when a clinician can connect with that patient. And you started this a while ago, which is very interesting, where a lot of people think that telemedicine just happened recently, but then COVID came and people start adopting it. You've been doing this for a pretty long time, and as a matter of fact, you've built a pretty massive doctor network. I believe you have over 95,000 US-licensed doctors in over 147 specialties, and you've helped over hundreds of millions of people online through mobile devices, which is quite fascinating. So tell me about it. So if a clinician wants to join your platform, are they independent clinicians, or do you have is it a whole network? How does that work?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Well, thanks for that wonderful summary of what we've done. You're absolutely right, more than 90,000 US-licensed doctors have joined the platform. It's really easy for doctors to join. You can go online at HealthTap.com, say, I want to sign up as a provider, and you give us your information. We do manually verify every single doctor to confirm that they're licensed in one or more US state and their license is in good standing. We don't allow doctors that have significant board actions or other harms against their reputation to participate on our platform. And once the doctor signed up, then the doctor has a feed and they can answer any questions, it's entirely voluntary. Doctors help, and there are many ways they can help. They can use, parts of the site allow them to donate their knowledge. So we have a thing called RateRx where doctors can rate treatments and give the share the knowledge of what works for treating what, which we can then share with our patients, but the real focus of that service is answering patients' questions, and doctors find it quite rewarding to be able to help someone using their knowledge and experience and share that. Doctors are thrilled with the fact that when they answer one patient's question, their answer goes into a library. So the next time a question like that is asked, the answer is already there. In fact, we have nearly 3 million doctor answers to questions asked by patients on HealthTap, and the library is so extensive that most questions get asked have already been answered, and often by, more than once, and often by doctors in different specialties. So you can see different specialty interests and focus on answers to questions. And it's a really wonderful resource for people as a starting point who have questions about health or health concerns to find out what the real doctor's opinion is on the answer to those questions. I would point out, there's one other interesting aspect of our service that was really, we didn't initially appreciate how important this would be, but it's turned out to be central to the way it works, which is peer review. Doctors have a peer review channel where they read the answers that other doctors have given to questions. What we've discovered is that doctors are learning from each other by reading each other's answers to questions where they're the expert reviewing the answer, but they're also learning from answers that come from other doctors. And then the real value to patients is that they can see which answers other doctors agree with, and we transparently show who the doctors are and what their background is and training and where they are and so on. So you have confidence that an answer is a valid and helpful one because it comes from a doctor whose training, you can see.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite interesting, and I like the take that you have as you describe what HealthTap does, right? It's the first time I've heard of a company that provides telemedicine services, which I believe you do, but it's grounded on education. That community element of how you start it is still there, right? Because you didn't start off initially as a, providing telemedicine services, more answering questions for patients. So it looks like that community aspect, despite the fact that you're doing telemedicine, that core value of the foundation is still there. So it means that that's something that mattered to you.
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
And I'm very proud of the fact that we as a company address the needs of physicians and have created a service that's sufficiently valuable and interesting. The doctors are volunteering their time and benefiting from interacting with us on the platform, even if their particular circumstance doesn't allow them to be delivering virtual healthcare on our platform. So as you mentioned, 147 specialties, our virtual care services are focused right now on primary care. So if you're a neurosurgeon or an orthopedic surgeon or an OB-GYN, you can still participate on our platform even if you're not delivering virtual care. And of course, all the internal medicine, pediatrician, family medicine doctors are able to directly connect with patients and deliver primary care on a one-on-one basis. And I guess it's sort of implied here, there's two really parts of the service. We have a large network of doctors who are engaging, helping people, and curating and growing this library of medical information that we give for free to people around the world. We help people in 191 countries, hundreds of millions of times with that content. But when it turns out that you need help, when the answer from the doctor is, hey, you really need to get one-on-one care, we can deliver that also because the doctors are available, and whether that's immediately, 24/7 in all 50 states where you can push a button and a doctor will be there within about 2 minutes, usually more than half the time the doctor is on the order of 2 minutes to answer the call. So you can actually connect with a doctor immediately or more significantly, you can pick a doctor. You can say, hey, I want to get as much of my care online as is possible, as is reasonable, as is helpful, and you can select among the different doctors and then schedule a visit, which might even be later today. The doctor has a slot that's open, you can schedule a visit, and then meet your doctor, and we make the first visits longer. So we assume that when you first meet a doctor if you want to establish a relationship, it takes more than just a few minutes. And so our first visit with the primary care doctor is always half an hour, so you get half an hour of quality time with your doctor to discuss your health issues and establish a health plan, address any immediate issues that are there, and plan for follow-up. Once you've seen the doctor, you can then text your doctor in-between visits. We don't let random texting of a doctor you don't know, with a doctor you don't know, but we do allow texting with a doctor who knows you, once the doctor gets to know you. And we found that doctors asked for this and the patients really, really want it, which is the ability to communicate with their doctor between visits, because so much of what needs to happen is minor things that can be addressed easily with a text or a question, do I need an appointment? And the doctor can respond, yes, I need to talk to you about that. And so you're not doing unnecessary appointments for small things and things that can be managed by a text interaction can be done. Hey, doc, my blood pressure medicine needs a refill, everything's fine, can you refill my medicine? And the doctor can say yes and push the button and that's it. They don't have to have a follow-up visit if everything is routine and the doctor thinks that's okay. But the doctor can also say, hey, we changed your dose and I'm worried about this or that, but why don't you do a visit and let's go through where we are to do the right thing now? So the doctor gets to guide the patient to an appropriate use of the doctor's time, and the doctors get to feel responsible for actually managing their patients over time, and I think this is new in telehealth. I don't know that there are too many other companies that are taking this approach of, it's possible to meet and establish a wonderful personal connection relationship with your doctor and then have that doctor be able to manage your ongoing care over time for all the care that can be done virtually.
Emmanuel Fombu:
This sounds too good to be true. It's actually fully value-based care, right? And it brings back that element of the human element back into medicine. And most importantly, there's a book actually called The Death of Expertise, and if you read that book by Tom Nichols, and it talks about in today's world where everyone is an expert online, right? So it doesn't matter if you're a scientist or whatever you are, an expert in whatever field you're in, if you say something and someone that is ignorant makes another comment, so for some reason, people think that it's equal statement. It's not the same, right, especially in today's world of misinformation. So having a platform like yours so patients can go and you have vetted clinicians to actually answer questions based on science and experience, it's something that I think that society needs in general.
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Manny, you're singing our song. The idea that free is not the same as trusted and online people want things to be free, but most of what's free you can't trust. And we decided that it was important to create a platform where the people giving the answers actually can be trusted, or the doctors who are trusted are reviewing each other's answers and identifying or complementing an answer when additional information is needed. And it's been, as I say, extremely rewarding for me personally to see how the doctors have responded by wanting to help people and having vetted trusted doctors who are actually licensed to practice medicine giving the answers, I think is really a key to having those answers be trusted and trustworthy.
Emmanuel Fombu:
This is fascinating. It's an ideal platform. It's like a community for clinicians and patients to actually come in and everyone is checking on each other to make sure the information is accurate and people have open opinions, right? That's actually, a peer-reviewed element it still exists, and so patients can really trust that information they're getting is coming from an expert and they're being vetted by other experts, which I think is fascinating. So for all this, this must cost a million dollars a month. How much do you charge? How is the business model?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
The truly amazing thing about all of this is that because of the scale of the technology, because the same, once you've built the platform, the cost of running it is much less than in the real world of brick and mortar, where you have rent on a building and a lot of people who are in the building that you have to pay to keep the building running, your building clerks, your front office desk personnel, the ancillary medical personnel are very expensive and they cause in-office, in-person care to be quite costly. In our case, the platform itself does all of that work, it does, it automates scheduling and interaction, and communication without having to have a person answering the phone. We automate the billing processes so the doctors don't have to spend time in doing that. Long-winded answer, the bottom line is, we ask people that want to keep their doctor to subscribe to our service and it costs $15 a month. And for a subscriber, a visit, a routine follow-up visit, which can be up to 15 minutes long, is $39. The cost of the visit is comparable to the co-pay that most people have to pay for a $100 or $200 office visit, and they get essentially the same service for primary care. Now, of course, we can't do things that require physical manipulation or a medical physical exam, but it turns out that 70% or 80% of the time for routine ambulatory outpatient care, a physical exam is not actually required. And most of the time, the problems that people have can actually be addressed through a virtual interaction.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite fascinating. I mean, it costs, and insurance, basically, patient insurance, clearly, correct?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Well, you can, in our system, if you have insurance, you can use insurance, and if your co-pay is less than $39, you'll pay the co-pay for your insurance, and we accept, so we do accept insurance. And we've been quite thrilled with the response we've had from Medicare patients and some Medicare Advantage programs where we don't have to collect a co-pay, we can actually deliver care and have it completely covered by the Medicare program. And those patients, 65 plus, actually, are extremely well positioned to benefit from virtual care. Some patients have the, or the inconvenience of seeing the doctor in the office is greater and they have a much higher incidence of ongoing conditions that require ongoing care from a doctor. And the last point I'd make is that we've seen in medicine that people that have ongoing conditions do much better if they have more frequent contact with their healthcare providers, that people don't notice when they're slipping into worse condition or they avoid care because it's so troublesome or problematic to go visit the doctor in the office and they allow themselves to get worse, and a more timely interaction with the person that can be done virtually prevents more serious outcomes from occurring. So the idea of having a virtual doctor available to you that you can access more conveniently, more easily, more quickly, leads to more effective ongoing care for people that do have chronic conditions.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is very interesting. So if we talk about the demographics that you mentioned, Medicare, Medicaid, patient populations, so overall demographics, do you find a much older population, younger population, who is your ideal client, like the average person on your platform?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Well, I mean, traditionally, if you look at the users of online health information, for example, you typically see a demographic that skews a bit younger, 30 to 40-year-old, classically or traditionally more female-dominated, women being the head of the household, managing the care of their kids and their spouse and sometimes their parents. And we do see that, particularly on the information side, we see a slightly older demographic among those who are benefiting from ongoing virtual care. So we're seeing younger people using the urgent care because they don't have a doctor already, they don't, may not perceive a need to have a doctor, but when they need an issue to have a medical issue, they want to see a doctor right now, and so we are seeing younger folks using the urgent care. But those who are particularly those who are over 40 and those people might have hyperlipidemia, you know, your cholesterol is high. You need to, you should have that managed if you have ongoing asthma as a common condition, that's something you want to take care of. The incidence of type two diabetes in this country is tremendous, and those patients in particular benefit enormously from having a good and close relationship with a doctor, and for managing diabetes, all the information is available to you through blood testing and home testing, and through talking with the doctor where some of what's happening, of course, the doctor is motivating, encouraging, incentivizing a healthier lifestyle and attention to the underlying condition, which has tremendous long-term effects if you can keep the diabetes under control or suppress it through motivation to a diet and exercise and do the things that we know will improve the course. So this, to answer your question, though, a slightly older demographic and particularly those people that have one or more of these underlying conditions that are well managed through virtual care.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And thanks for that answer. What is the average length of, what's a customer lifetime value, right? If you have someone join the platform, what's the longest member of your platform? Have you had someone, for example, that's been on for ten years, five years?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
So I can share with you that the urgent care population has a relatively short-duration subscription. If you're young and healthy and you have a specific medical problem, you get it taken care of, you may not see the need to maintain a relationship with that doctor, and so those patients can come back, but it's on the order of many months. On the other hand, if you have diabetes or asthma or hypertension, and hypertension itself, you're healthy, but you need treatment, you can manage your blood sugar, pressure at home, but you need to have a doctor give the appropriate medicines to keep you under control and other conditions, and for those patients that have a chronic condition who sign up in the virtual primary care clinic, they're staying with us, projected for many years. Again, we've only had the virtual primary care clinic for now a little, less than two years. And so we have larger, large and growing population of people are with us for that long, and of course, we can project from the rate at which their, don't renew, the expected lifetime value in, it's many years at this point.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I think that was a great actually change in business strategy from the urgent piece. We actually have members that actually are taking care of healthcare going forward as opposed to instantaneous touchpoints. But with that being said, so do you have your own like EHR system that is unique to HealthTap?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
So the wonderful thing about being, having the ability to build this platform over time and add incrementally components to it as we add new features and capabilities, is the entire platform is built by us. There's not a single third-party component from right down to the codec for the video to, so we have the, had the luxury and the delight to have build a single integrated platform so we can control the experience that both patients and doctors have so we can have a solution that you can use on any platform. You can use it on your Android phone or your tablet, you can use it on your iPhone or your iPad, you can use it on a browser. You can use Chrome or Internet Explorer or Safari on a mac or a PC, and so we are able to, because we built the platform ourselves, deliver a service to people on the devices they actually have. And all of the components, including the EHR, we've built from the ground up. And this has allowed us to create a solution that's easy and delightful for doctors to use. It improves our ability to train doctors because it's self-evident. We have a one-pager that describes how to do it, and then you go and use it and you can see and just doctors take a day to see the service, use it, and then it's so inherently obvious how it works that they don't have trouble using it. It doesn't require a three-day full-time Epic-style training session to learn the vagaries of the system and how to do things. We've streamlined it and made it straightforward so that, it is used, it's one of the reasons why the doctors like us so much.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And a lot of clinicians on the platform, do they only work for HealthTap per se, or do they have HealthTap and then private practice? Maybe, is it like more of a part-time piece, full-time?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Really, it really is a mosaic. Particularly on the urgent care side, we have a model that looks a little bit like Uber, where doctors who may do other things can at their will whenever they want, push the button and make themselves available, and then see the next patient in the queue of care. So those doctors will have another job in a different setting. On the virtual primary care clinic, we do have a core set of doctors who work exclusively with us, they're working full-time with us and benefiting from having a virtual healthcare experience. But even on the virtual primary care clinic, we do allow doctors to have an in-person practice and define a set of days or hours during the week, which they want to do virtually so that you can combine as a doctor of an in-person in-office practice with a virtual practice. We like to think if you do fewer than 20 hours a week with us, that it's hard to, we like doctors to at least that much to be on board with and follow along with the guidelines, the protocols, and the approach that we promote, and so that you pay attention to our guidelines for how to manage different kinds of conditions as new medical events arise.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Very interesting. I know recently, you know, I know CMS, for example, started reimbursing for remote patient monitoring kind of codes, right? And especially in this world of telemedicine, you have a clinician base, you give the one-page summary reports and everything that you do. Do you, are you partnered with any remote patient monitoring companies, any device kind of companies, you take advantage of the opportunity to actually remotely monitor patients?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
I agree, there's certainly an opportunity there and that remote patient monitoring is a valid and appropriate use of the technology. It does need to be coupled, as you've just highlighted, with a specific provider in a locale, and so to do such things requires relationship-building, relationships on a local level. We, at least in this phase of the company, have a broad-based solution that works in all 50 states, and we're reaching out to find people in medical deserts, places where the providers aren't, and we're reaching out to places, to people everywhere, even in places where providers may be available but they need the convenience of virtual care. Your provider could be across the street, but if it takes an hour to get them on the phone and then when you get them, the scheduled appointment is three weeks from now, they could be right there, but it's way more convenient to have a virtual doctor who's available to you the same day.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Now, correct, I think there's a lot of opportunity. I think the HealthTap will continue to grow. I like the business strategy and the direction in which you are going. And so what I've been what, as we wrap up our discussion today, I would like to learn from you what has been the biggest roadblock, right, or the biggest bottleneck or challenge you've experienced during this journey of innovating in healthcare?
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Well, that's a really good question. I would point out, when we first got started 12 years ago, everyone knew it was impossible. If I had a dime for everyone who told me, don't bother asking doctors to answer questions because they never will unless you pay them, everyone thought that was true, and here we have 3 million answers that rather disprove that position. So the cultural roadblocks of, when you have, until you've done it, people don't believe it's possible. It's kind of a theme. When virtual medicine first came out, people didn't think it was possible to deliver quality care to a patient that you didn't see in the office. And that, I have to tell you personally, when I got started, I thought of virtual care as an adjunct, that it was perfect for someone that you had previously met and you could do follow-up care, and that's very true, but that cultural shift of realizing and discovering that you can meet someone online virtually with a high-definition video connection and get to know them in a way that's as or more powerful than what happens in the office. So that cultural shift of recognizing for the doctors that they could give care, I'm one of them, right? Took me a while to recognize that you can actually, I had to do it myself to really fully realize the extent to believe and understand how connected you can be with a virtual. So overcoming the doctor's perception that you can't give good care virtually. And the AMA ten years ago was completely adamantly opposed to telemedicine, saying that would be terrible, they've completely changed their tune today. So that was a roadblock to begin with, right, the doctors' attitudes. The other big one would be the people weren't used to it. Oh my goodness, the fear of the unknown. The, what would it be like to talk to somebody you've never met that you don't know? And would that be difficult or scary or, I'm not sure what. It's one of those things that you can talk about, but it's not the same thing as experiencing. And one of the wonderful, amazing, I shouldn't say it was wonderful, one of the side effects consequences of the COVID pandemic was that people were pushed to try it. And as a result of trying it, we've seen a transformation in people's willingness and interest to interact with doctors virtually, because once you've tried it and discovered that you can meet people and it's just like meeting them in the office, like you'll like some and you won't like others, but you can connect with someone that you like and you connect with and you appreciate and develop a relationship virtually. And so overcoming that, that cultural expectation obstacle, if you will, has simply required time for people to experience it. There's still lots of people haven't yet, with the numbers large, but still lots of people that haven't yet experienced or discovered, or worse yet, they went to one of the other companies that was transactional in nature and had, doctors who are trying to get off the line as quickly as possible to do the next patient. And if you have one of those virtual interactions, then you may not be totally convinced that this is for you. The patients who meet our doctors, I mean, I've been stunned with the response we get from people who meet doctors in virtual primary care. We have, we ask after every consult for a ratings of stars, 1 to 5. Our average star rating for doctors in virtual primary care clinic is greater than 4.9 stars. I mean, it's just I never thought that was possible, and yet we're experiencing it with our virtual care solution. So I'm very proud of that.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I don't think there could be a better way to wrap up the discussion. Those people, the people I would call, bite the orange, they bit the orange, they took that opportunity, took that chance to actually try it out, right? It doesn't hurt to try it out. And I think exactly what you're doing, I think if anyone is listening, you know, to Dr. Geoff Rutledge, please put your contact information and how to get in contact with you. I think more clinicians should join the movement, join HealthTap, answer questions for patients, participate in the platform, and make sure that healthcare is better for all of us, right? And I believe together we can make the future healthcare reality.
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Thank you, Manny. Whether you're a doctor or a patient, you can go to HealthTap.com, and sign up and it's free. And if you want to join the medical network, if you're a primary care doctor and want to deliver care, there's an application online that we can also take. If you're a patient and want to actually do a visit, you can sign up and become a subscriber. It's free to join and use the service and get all the information. If you want to talk to a doctor and get healthcare, you can subscribe to our service and try it out online. And of course, download the application to your device.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Definitely. So thanks, thanks, Dr. Geoff Rutledge, welcome. Thank you for taking the opportunity to join us today. I hope to have you back on the show again very soon.
Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Thank you, Manny. Delight chatting with you today.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you for listening to Bite the Orange. If you want to change healthcare with us, please contact us at info@EmmanuelFombu.com, or you can visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com or BitetheOrange.com. If you liked this episode and want more information about us, you could also visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com.
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About Geoffrey W. Rutledge:
Geoffrey W. Rutledge has been in the practice of Internal Medicine since 1983. He has been active as a physician, teacher, researcher, consultant, and medical executive who applies computer-based technologies to improve healthcare. He combines 25 years of clinical practice as an Emergency Physician and Internist with computer science and informatics training and experience to develop new technology solutions in healthcare. He believes it is critically important to have a doctor who can knowledgeably assess new health concerns in consideration of ongoing conditions, medical history, and lifestyle. He is the Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder of HealthTap, a platform that demonstrates the power of mobile interactive technology to enable doctors to deliver better, more efficient, and cost-effective healthcare that truly delights both doctors and their patients.
Things You’ll Learn:
Communication is foundational to delivering healthcare.
HealthTap has built a massive doctor network of 95,000 US-licensed and verified doctors in more than 147 specialties.
HealthTap has a free library of nearly 3 million doctor answers to inquiries asked by patients.
Patients can subscribe to HealthTap’s virtual primary care clinic for $15 a month and only have to pay $39 per visit or less, depending on their insurance status and whether they are enrolled in a government program.
When a patient has a chronic condition, it is precious to have an easily accessible virtual doctor.
HealthTap allows doctors to have an in-person practice and define their virtual schedule to combine in-office and virtual practices or use an Über-like model where they make themselves available whenever they want.