About a year into offering remote doctor visit services to employees, one of the most surprising findings that Jon Kipp, executive director of strategic health initiatives and services at Comcast NBCUniversal, pulled out of his data was that employees were using the service during business hours, when a doctor's office is open.
He and Andy Rosa, director of benefits and workforce health at AmeriGas, shared their experiences deploying telehealth programs during a panel session at the National Conference on Health, Productivity and Human Capital in Boston this week. Both companies offer Doctor On Demand and cover the entire cost of the program for covered employees.
"I went into telemedicine thinking, 'Gosh, we’re going to have these huge goal post graphs'," Kipp said. "Saturday and Sundays were going to just be straight up and the middle of the week was going to be down, and I expected to see the same thing at 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. I thought to myself, 'Oh my gosh, what do we do? We adopted telemedicine and it’s not doing what we thought'. But that was naive of me to think that telemedicine was really going to occur when the other care providers were closed."
Instead, Kipp found, patients were using the offering as a replacement for an urgent care or emergency room visit. The most popular days of the week to engage with the service were Mondays and Tuesdays and the most popular time period was between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m.
"What we now think is people don’t really consume healthcare when the other providers are closed," he said. "They wake up, it’s breakfast time, their child is sick or has pink eye, and they make the call around the breakfast table. Or if they're sick, they decide at 10 a.m. once they've gotten everybody off to work or school or they're supposed to report to work that they consume healthcare."
This, he added, was a benefit for the company, not just from a cost standpoint, but also from a productivity standpoint.
Comcast NBCUniversal's population includes 74,484 covered employees and 171,983 total covered lives. The conglomerate owns businesses that range from cable providers to theme parks so the job descriptions within Comcast NBCUniversal range from studio executive to furry character, Kipp said.
About 5 percent of the company's employees are registered for its telehealth service, which launched in September 2014. And a little over 2 percent of the company's covered lives are registered, although Kipp pointed out that 18 percent of engagement came from the zero to 17 age group and the younger ages likely didn't make their own account. Another interesting fact, Kipp said, was that the 18 to 24 year old group accounted for just 6 percent of engagement with the telehealth offering.
"We continue to look at that, we would think that would be a higher market given our demographic and I think that’s one thing employers need to consider," Kipp said. "They tend to be tech-driven, they tend not to read the brochures we put up on the wall, so we continue to look for new ways to engage that group."
The company predicts that by August 2016, 11 percent of employees will be registered.
AmeriGas, which has an employee base that's made up of mostly truck drivers, service technicians, and service representatives, also saw interesting results when they broke out their calls by age group. Around 50 percent of the company's engagement came from people over the age of 40. AmeriGas launched its employee wellness program in February 2015 and a little under 5 percent of its 14,681 eligible members have registered. The company predicted that between 12 and 15 percent will be registered by February 2016.
"This is clearly a 'you can teach an old dog new tricks'," Rosa said. "We have a lot of employees. People come to AmeriGas, they stay at AmeriGas. These are very good jobs in the rural parts of the country, we keep people for a long time. We have a lot of 60 year olds that come to work for us... so we have a lot of 50 and 60 year old folks using this through their smartphones because there’s a sense that, 'Are people connected? Are they going to get into telehealth? Are they going to comfortable with it?' And you're talking about close to 50 percent of our population over 40 is using it, it tells you that people can get connectivity, they’re comfortable with it, it’s simple to use."
Rosa added that mobile also tied into the company's overall strategy. AmeriGas is giving all of its drivers iPads to do their work. While a lot of drivers used to rip the edges off the delivery coupons, AmeriGas is moving them to iPads and loading Doctor On Demand onto the iPads to use during the workday.
AmeriGas also found that even though their employee population is heavily male, surprisingly, 63 percent of their engagement came from women.
Comcast NBCUniversal has also helped develop its own digital health offerings in the past. In February, NBCUniversal announced that it was working with Under Armour to create original content for Radius, NBCUniversal's digital fitness offering that offers unlimited access to fitness videos for a weekly, semi-annual, or annual subscription. The service has since shut down. A month later, Telemundo, the Spanish language division of NBC Universal, partnered with PatientPoint, maker of patient engagement platforms for providers, to offer Telemundo’s Spanish language educational materials to Spanish-speaking patient populations in the US.
