Telemedicine is moving up a gear. Sunday, the champion of making medical appointments online, Doctolib, announced that it began to deploy its teleconsultation tool, four months after the spread of this practice to the entire territory.
Imperatives to respect. Still not widespread in France, telemedicine must respect a few rules to be reimbursed by Social Security as a physical consultation:
- The patient must already be known by the doctor who uses it, ie he must have seen it physically at least once in the last twelve months.
- It must be a doctor who also offers consultations in a practice or at home in patients.
Are virtual consultations adapted to all diseases? "For an acute pathology of someone we do not know, certainly not!" Slice Luc Refabert, pediatrician in Paris. The tool, made available to the 70,000 health professionals present on the platform, is nonetheless useful. "I deal with a lot of chronic conditions, and for a child who has an asthma attack in physical consultation, for example, we want to know a little bit about how it goes a day or two later."
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"Adapt the treatment". Telemedicine can even help identify the pathology of a patient more quickly and efficiently. Luc Refabert remembers "a child who coughed a lot" received teleconsultation: "I had him undress in front of the camera to watch how he breathed, to hear him cough, and it allowed me to adapt the treatment."
Caution on the choice of the platform. In this new business, for which the National Health Insurance Fund has planned a six-month assessment in March, other companies have been offering virtual consultations for a few months, such as Qare , MyDoctors , Livi or Docavenue . We must be careful to choose a platform that complies with the rules of health insurance because the risk for a patient is to be treated but not reimbursed at the end.