Telehealth and smart virtual services that are starting to aggregate around it offer us significant new opportunities to manage healthcare budgets more efficiently, while maintaining and sometimes even improving access and safety.

With Australia embracing telehealth at scale by deciding to rebate it on the MBS, we’ve introduced to our healthcare system something of the potential of the economics of load balancing in power generation.

One emerging service which seems like a bit of a no brainer in this opportunity is My Emergency Doctor (MED), although it should be noted that MED does not currently get any MBS funding.

At its heart MED is just a bank of on-call emergency specialist doctors (all 90 or so are Fellows of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, FACEM) who are made available virtually for any circumstance in the system where our base load capacity for the emergency care expertise on offer is being exceeded, and we need an efficient means of meeting peak demand.

“The business really is about providing our healthcare system complementary access to emergency specialists, for those times, and places when that access is most difficult,” says CEO of MED Bill Maiden.

“We are a partnering provider of care when frankly, the system struggles to be able to cope with unforeseen and sometimes consistent spikes in demand.”

Read more on the Wild Health blog.