The two types of Telemedicine: Synchronous vs Asynchronous with Dr. Purdy

Nov 23 2021 • 50 mins

In this episode of This Week in Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy invite Dr. Laura Purdy, CEO and CoFounder of MD Integrations, All in One Telehealth solutions company.
Dr. Purdy is a 15 year army veteran and started her career in military medical school and as a hospitalist in military. She realized early on that telehealth will be the future of healthcare for simple things such as poison ivy or pink eye.
In the old days of telehealth, there were a lot of challenges from technical challenge to scheduling patients.
Jimmy asks about asynchronous use of telehealth. Asynchronous is offline dialog and not real-time communication. Direct to consumer telehealth companies are at different stages of development. All of these companies have to deal with the same technical challenges including the portal and integration. This is where MD Integrations has an API which is designed for asynchronous telehealth.
One of the biggest pain points of telehealth is EMR. Today's EMRs are not designed for telehealth service, they are still designed for core brick and mortar services.
Jimmy asks the question if asynchronous telehealth will increase over synchronous visits because patients do not prefer face to face visit if possible similar to other industries. Dr. Purdy explains the differences between the two and does think that asynchronous visits will continue to increase over face to face telehealth visits. The numbers are showing decrease in synchronous or real-time telehealth visits.
On-demand healthcare is the future and asynchronous is able to assist w/ the same. Dr. Purdy provides examples of asynchronous use and why face to face call does not always make sense.
Vik then asks why there are so many niche telehealth companies springing up when there are telehealth giants such as Teledoc and Livingo. Dr. Purdy explains in detail the reason behind need for niche telehealth companies and why this market does not need to depend only on the telehealth giants.
The group then jumps in the integration challenges related to Telehealth and how to overcome challenge of access to data from health system, clinic, telehealth portals.

Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.com
Twitter: @TWIHT1
Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/
Music Provided by Soundstripe.com
Linkedin: Vik Patel
Linkedin: Jimmy Kim
Guest Information:
LinkedIn: Dr. Laura Purdy
Website: https://mdintegrations.com/