This is a very realistic vision for telemedicine. It will be a very useful advance in care delivery … but it is not an attractive investment.
The key point made — Medicare will reimburse telemedicine visits the same as in-office visits (a massive change), more providers will provide telemedicine WITHIN their own practices. Counterintuitively, this won’t be great for the “Telemedicine” Teledoc / American Well model because those rely on patients going outside of their normal doctors for convenience.
Now, a patient can stay with their regular doctor and system and get telemedicine treatment. Thus, for patients with regular doctors, we don’t expect them to go out-of-system to these telemedicine providers.
For telemedicine to improve care … it needs to be integrated as a modality NOT a driver of fragmentation.