Kelly Bliss, president of US Group Health at Teladoc

Mobile Apps

Teladoc Launches Integrated Health App

Unified experiences are the name of the game in 2023, and Teladoc just made its first play of the year by revamping its mobile app to cater to the whole-person care needs of its users.

The new app integrates Teladoc’s services for primary care, mental health, and chronic condition management, paving the way for more patients to reap the benefits of personalized navigation to all of their treatments with a single login.

• The app includes all of Teladoc’s services that can be covered under employers and health plans (DTC solutions like BetterHelp remain separate), enabling users to view services covered by their health plan and review care plans across all their physicians.

• An engagement component translates real-time data for clinicians and patients into “applied health signals” designed to improve decision making for all parties.

• Teladoc is aiming to drive better health outcomes (and revenue) by steering patients toward a combination of its services when appropriate, giving the example of better A1C levels and blood pressure control for those enrolled in both its chronic care and mental health programs.

The other major highlight from the press release was that Teladoc’s full suite of services is now available in Spanish on the mobile app and website, welcome news for the 40M Americans that report speaking Spanish at home. 

• Teladoc is clearly going out of its way to improve the Spanish-speaking member experience beyond the new language option, adding over 100 Spanish-speaking providers and expanding its nutrition plans to include cultural preferences.

The Takeaway

It was almost surprising to find out that Teladoc didn’t already have a unified experience for its various solutions given the clear benefits of bringing them under the same roof, but apparently it wanted to get the care coordination features dialed before the grand debut. The app is now available in select markets, but it’ll be interesting to hear how dialed the final product really is after the nationwide roll out later this year.

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The Wire

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• GE Spinoff Complete: A new medtech giant was born last week, as GE HealthCare completed its long-awaited spinoff and began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker GEHC. GE HealthCare emerges as an $18B precision care company operating four key businesses (Imaging, Ultrasound, Patient Care Solutions, and Pharmaceutical Diagnostics) that will be supported by $1B in annual R&D and a 51k-person workforce. It also debuts with a new level of focus that can be hard to achieve when operating as part of a conglomerate (or while executing a spinoff).

• Surprise Billing Dispute Surge: CMS’ surprise billing dispute resolution portal received over 90k requests during its first five months (April – September 2022), as providers and health plans navigated the No Surprises Act. The majority of disputes involved ED CPT codes (66%), followed by radiology and anesthesia codes (9% & 7%).

• Apple Watch Lawsuit: A class-action lawsuit filed in New York alleges that the Apple Watch’s pulse oximeter technology is racially biased and has wide accuracy variations in measuring blood oxygen levels depending on skin color. The lawsuit takes it a step beyond calling out the racial bias of the technology by claiming that Apple “unjustly enriched” itself and committed fraud by misrepresenting the Apple Watch’s ability to not “incorporate biases and defects of pulse oximetry with respect to persons of darker skin tone.”

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