President Trump has signed into law a bipartisan bill to create a three-digit number for mental health emergencies. The FCC had already picked 988 as the number for this hotline and aims to have it up and running by July 2022. The new law paves the way to make that a reality.
It's a no brainer that healthcare is shifting away from "fee for service" and more toward "value-based care". As this shift continues, innovative companies focusing on wholistic, patient-centric care models will stand out from the rest. Here's why I think Livongo's merger with Teladoc Health will do just that.
Amazon Care, a virtual health care service, is currently only available to Amazon employees and dependents in the state of Washington. The company is hiring more than half a dozen business development managers to “build and grow relationships with commercial and public sector enterprises.” A person familiar with the group’s plans says it has started reaching out to health plans and employers to discuss expansion.
If you’d talked to Joe Heyman around the 2000s, you might have taken him as a telemedicine naysayer. Back then, the Massachusetts OB-GYN was highly skeptical of the rash of new services sprouting up to remotely connect patients and physicians. He was wary, he told STAT, of patients “calling a total stranger and asking for clinical care,” and worried about building trust when a new doctor picked up the phone every time. He never once conducted a visit via video by the time he retired from seeing patients in 2014.
The company, which provides medical primary care through a mobile app, wasn’t looking to raise more money, the CEO says, but he began taking investors' calls in the early summer.
Teladoc Health Inc., the country's largest publicly traded telemedicine provider, has sued rival American Well Corp. for alleged patent violations related to technology behind robot-like carts that connect hospitalized patients with specialists in real time via video.