How Mobile Apps Helped 100,000 Get Virtually Free Healthcare

The challenges of achieving an efficient healthcare system are far reaching.  In the US, we are all familiar with HIPAA, healthcare fraud, delayed payments, PCI and the challenges of converting from traditional workflows into digital. As companies like OrboGraph help facilitate a transition to full automation of the insurance payment process, others are introducing innovations which are outside the box.

DaVincian Healthcare took mobile payments, digital technology, and kiosk technology to a place where people haven’t seen a health care provider ever, and managed to get medical care to over 100,000 people who had previously been completely unserved.

At least three months ago we started a pilot with 100 community service centers, with the idea that with a feature function phone a consumer could actually connect with a kiosk at a community service center and alert them that they wanted to speak with a doctor – which they can do through either text messaging or if the service center had 3G, via videoconferencing and telediagnostics.

In this three-month period, we’ve seen 100,000 patients that never had access to a doctor before. Fifty percent of all the care provided was free and for the other 50 percent, the average cost was less than $2; people were able to pay for that using their mobile phone.

While we tend to talk about alternate and mobile payment methods as conveniences — and even complain about how inept some of their interfaces can be — it’s good to remember that this technology can be brought to bear in a humanitarian manner.

Bravo, DaVincian Healthcare!