Mar 14
2019
Heal’s ‘First-time Patient’ Survey Proves Doctor House Calls Relieve Urgent Care and Emergency Room Inconvenience and Cost
Heal announced the results of its 2019 first-time patient user survey. Having delivered more than 110,000 house calls since February 2015, Heal shared a voluntary survey with more than 6,000 patients who used Heal for the first time in 2018. Findings from the survey reveal substantial reduction in ER and urgent care overuse and pointed to a corresponding increase in timely care delivery. A highlight of those results includes:
- 55.78 percent of first-time Heal users admit they would have gone to urgent care or an emergency room if Heal was not available
- 37.4 percent would have waited an extended period of time to see their doctor or would have passed on seeking treatment at all if Heal was not available
- 1.96 percent would have tried a telemedicine service if Heal was not available
According to a study in 2016 from the Health Care Cost Institute, the national median cost of emergency room visits for patients was nearly $1,917, while some states, such as California, range $2,268 or higher. As an ever-increasing number of patients choose Heal over avoidable trips to the ER or urgent care, Heal has delivered more than $65 million in healthcare cost savings to patients and insurance companies.
However, cost savings isn’t the only benefit Heal patients are claiming to experience. In a recently published academic paper, authored by Dr. Eric Topol and his team, “Characteristics of the modern-day physician house call.” They independently performed a retrospective observational analysis on data collected on Heal house calls made to 13,849 patients over one year from August 2016 to July 2017.