2 For TTY support, call 1-80 (English) or 1-80 (español). 1 If you’re traveling internationally, you can call the Away from Home Travel Line at 95 for support - anytime, anywhere. Can I speak to a clinician if I’m away from home? Yes, 24/7 virtual care from a Kaiser Permanente clinician is available across the U.S. If these options aren’t appropriate or available, you’ll be able to start an e-visit, make an appointment, or find a nearby urgent care location. What types of care options are offered? With our 24/7 virtual care option, you may be able to have a phone or video visit with a clinician. Don’t attempt to access emergency care through this site. If you think you or someone you care for is having a medical or mental health emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department. What if I’m having an emergency? Virtual care isn’t appropriate for urgent or emergency health needs. Availability depends on your symptoms, location, and the number of health care professionals who can meet your needs. Examples include a urinary tract infection, pink eye, cold and flu, and other conditions where a clinician can virtually diagnose, recommend treatment, order prescriptions, and provide guidance about follow-up care. When should I try 24/7 virtual care? Phone and video visits are appropriate when you need quick, convenient care that doesn’t require immediate hands-on assistance from a health care professional. March 7 in the Venetian, Palazzo E.With our 24/7 virtual care option, you can visit with a Kaiser Permanente clinician by phone or online for certain conditions - without an appointment. There’s a whole other way of communicating and this is it.”Īri Melmed will be speaking in the session, “Chat with a Doctor: On-Demand, Asynchronous Physician Advice,” at 4 p.m. There’s a rampant conflation of telehealth with video visits and the two should not be thought of as synonymous. “Everyone is focused on video, video, video. “I think chat is really under the radar,” he said. But for some reason people expect healthcare to be different. Even outside of healthcare, consumers text one another more easily and more frequently than they use services like Skype. Our satisfaction is through the roof.”Īs for chat, Melmed said that it’s the natural way people communicate in 2017. It’s just unprecedented in most people’s healthcare experience. They’re just not used to having instant access to a physician. “We’ve found that this is very surprising and highly satisfying to the members.

“One of the unusual things about this program is we put the physician up front rather than having the members go through a screening process of some sort,” Melmed said. He attributes the traction to two things: direct connection to doctors and the ease of the chat format. Melmed said the program now sees 100 to 200 visitors a day. “Someone thinks they’ve got flu or UTI or sinus infection we can help them determine whether or not they in fact do, and if they need antibiotics or an inhaler or a prescription for something we can enter that into their Kaiser medical record and get that sorted out.” “What we’ve found is somewhere around two-thirds of the issues, we can resolve right there on chat,” Melmed said. If the condition is more complicated, they connect the patient to a staffer who will schedule an appointment. The doctor can assess simple things and prescribe some medications. If they do, they’re connected directly to a Kaiser doctor who is chatting with a maximum of three other patients. And we are able, via a chat service that allows for uploading photos but doesn’t use video, to resolve a huge percentage of these encounters.”Ĭhat with a Doctor works like this: When patients go to Kaiser’s main website or to book an appointment, they have the option to use the chat service instead. “Predominantly, it’s people who either know they have something straightforward or are not sure if they need to be evaluated in person or if their condition is something serious. “We trialed this as a mechanism by which we would be able to help our members avoid unnecessary ER visits, but it has turned into something far bigger,” said Ari Melmed, MD, an ER doctor at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, oversees the Chat with a Doctor program. But Kaiser Permanente Colorado has discovered that, for the integrated system, a simple text chat is an easier sell - as its impressive uptake numbers demonstrate. When people think about direct-to-consumer telemedicine, they often think of video visits or phone calls.

Kaiser permanente video visits