COVID-19 the acme of ‘there’s an app for that’
Written by Kate McDonald on 25 March 2022.
This week started off with the interesting news that private health insurer Medibank had invested $10 million in telehealth start-up Medinet. Telehealth start-ups are of course a dime a dozen, promising to revolutionise this and disrupt that, but that’s been the case for the last 10 years or so for those in the business.
We’ve been reporting on telehealth for 15 years and remember the big uptake beginning in 2010-2012, along with health insurer interest in telehealth platforms. For instance, HCF took an early stake in long-standing platform GP2U, which recently sold to UK-based telehealth provider Doctor Care Anywhere for $11m.
Several private telehealth providers have come and gone, most notably Telstra Health’s efforts and Medibank’s own Medibank Health Solutions, and fierce resistance from GP groups has historically seen off some of Healthdirect’s publicly funded efforts. The only benefit we can see in Medibank’s investment in Medinet is its ability to generate digital referrals to specialists, pathology and imaging, and its low initial cost for GP consults and prescriptions. That might be the key.
Medinet is charging $38 for a consult, which is pretty much on par with face-to-face GPs before they tack on their fee. Even with a Medicare rebate, you’d come out close to evens using this telehealth service, particularly as GPs are increasingly being encouraged to go down the mixed billing route. Perhaps Medibank is onto a winner after all in capturing a growing cohort of patients who want convenience at the same price as old-fashioned face to face consultations. The RACGP might have missed a boat here, or Medibank has chosen the right time to invest.
Another big story this week was the announcement by ASX-listed ResApp that it had adapted its existing technology for investigating lung conditions through cough sounds to take in COVID-19 screening. ResApp has a few runs on the board in terms of a diagnostic test for pneumonia, which is CE Marked and TGA approved, and is also used for COPD and asthma.
It has quite a bit of science behind it from UQ associate professor of biomedical engineering Udantha Abeyratne and a number of studies over the last decade, but it still seems a bit out there that cough sounds can distinguish diseases and conditions. Every doctor we have spoken to this week has voiced scepticism, to put it mildly, but ResApp insists its algorithms work, and it is now looking to head into clinical trials.
COVID-19 is obviously topical, but ResApp is also looking at seasonal respiratory illnesses such as flu and RSV. A cheap, easily distributed app that rules out infection but may have a high false positive rate, which can then go on to further testing like RAT or PCR, would prove very attractive in mass screening initiatives, particularly those in low income nations.
The other big news this week was some very minor movement in the excruciatingly slow roll-out of eReferrals to public hospitals in NSW – eHealth NSW appears to be the big bureaucratic nightmare in all of this – and the alleged “blindsiding” of the private hospital sector in the development of new cybersecurity rules for Australia’s critical infrastructure, such as tertiary hospitals with ICUs. It appears that the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) only included Private Healthcare Australia (PHA) – the private health insurance body – rather than the Australian Private Hospitals Association (APHA) – in its consultations.
It’s common as muck for the private healthcare sector to go cap in hand to regulators claiming they simply can’t afford new regulations, but it is something else that they claim they never heard of those new regulations in the first place. Something has gone seriously amiss here.
That brings us to our poll question for this week: while private hospital whinging over paying for cyber security is interesting enough, we were far more taken by the ResApp story. Taking into account that ResApp has TGA-approved diagnostics and is active in pneumonia, COPD and asthma:
Do you think ResApp’s technology for diagnosing COVID-19 has potential?
We urge you to look at the science before voting here and leaving your comments below.
Last week we asked: Will Hills succeed with its new healthcare-focused corporate strategy? It was a close-run thing: 44 per cent said no, 56 per cent said yes. But we also asked what you thought of its chances for success and why: here’s what you said.
RAP Price at posting:
8.1¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)