This morning Boston-based telemedicine company Amwell (formerly American Well) announced its new virtual-health offering geared towards small and medium physician practices with less than 100 providers. 

Clinicians using the platform, dubbed Amwell Private Practice, will be able to begin scheduling virtual appointments for their existing patients. Amwell also noted that the tool is currently available to these practices through June 30 with fully waived per-provider fees.

According to the startup, the tool includes customizable clinical workflows, e-Prescribing, online physician enrollment, staff training and payment-collection capabilities. 

The company is pitching this as a way for physician practices to reach patients in their homes. 

“As COVID-19 continues to force adaptation to our daily lives, and the way we need and experience Private Practice aims squarely to allow community-based care delivery to go on at times where physician offices are closed, or their on-site services are deeply limited,” Dr. Roy Schoenberg, president and CEO of Amwell, said in a statement.

WHY IT MATTERS 

As the coronavirus continues to spread across the world, increasingly more practices are looking to employ telemedicine to reach patients at home and curb the spread of infection. And small practices aren’t the only facilities seeing an increase in telehealth visits. 

"We are doing more virtual visits in a given day than we did the entire proceeding year, so things can change," John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children's Hospital, said during the recent MassChallenge Innovation Summit. "I don't see us going back to the way things were, in a positive way. I think we've opened physicians' eyes, opened up the administrators' eyes. Patients are recognizing the value. ... It has focused our team to deploy this at scale, and these kinds of digital practices become core to the practice of medicine going forward."

THE LARGER TREND 

Amwell has long been a major player in the telehealth space. In November it acquired Aligned Telehealth in order to grow its telepsychiatry platform.  

The company has also made some high-profile partnerships. Most recently it announced its work on The Clinic, a telehealth service specializing in comprehensive and high-acuity care jointly launched with the Cleveland Clinic. It has also been a part of the Apple Heart Study, which included big names like Stanford and BioTelemetry. 

ON THE RECORD 

“After years of serving the nations’ largest hospitals and health systems and learning and adapting to physicians’ preferences and workflows, we’re introducing an affordable, mature telehealth product for smaller physician offices," Schoenberg said. "Recent events have highlighted the inescapable role of this technology in the new balance between physical and digital-care delivery. Private Practice stands to make it easier for clinicians to make it part of their daily practice.”