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Analysis on American Well

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American Well To make health care coverage more affordable, the country must address the soaring cost of medical care that continues to increase at a dangerous rate. A greater focus is needed on the main drivers of medical cost growth: soaring prices for medical services, new costly prescription drugs and medical technologies, unhealthy lifestyles, and an outdated fee-for-service system. More than one-sixth of the U.S. economy is devoted to health care spending and that percentage continues to rise every year. Regrettably, our system is not delivering value commensurate with, for example an estimated $2.5 trillion in 2009 spend on health care.1 These costs punish us on multiple fronts. For American families, the soaring cost of medical …show more content…

Is Online Care a substitute or compliment to traditional medical care? Online Care would be a complement to traditional medical care. If a non-mainstream practice, such as “Team Edition”, can be used together with the conventional/traditional approach to healthcare, we can then label it as complimentary. The Schoenbergs’ were not trying to substitute the delivery of healthcare, but improve the efficiency of it. The change was made to enhance delivery of care with current communication technology which happens to have the benefit of both improving patient outcomes and reducing costs. What barriers to adoption do you forsee? Seeing that American Well has its benefits, there were some noted barriers as well. This included but not limited to the following: * Concerns surrounding the accuracy of online consultation, which may result in malpractice for the doctors involved * Physicians engaging in emails with patients – added to their workload and may not get reimbursed for the time spent * Fear of physicians adopting to the new technology/practice because reimbursement rates were low – needed more codes for billing purposes * HIPAA – there’s a perceived risk associated with patient information via online communication Consequentially for this not to fail, they must understand that this technology is innovative (new to the healthcare industry) and foreign to the providers involved.

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