Opinion: Coronavirus should finally smash the barriers to telemedicine

A patient sits in the living room of her apartment in the Brooklyn borough of New York during a telemedicine video conference with a doctor. – AP

Under normal circumstances, internist Jenni Levy makes house calls, checking on patients with chronic conditions and serving as what she calls "rolling urgent care”. She works for Landmark Health, which offers supplemental home visits to people with Medicare Advantage plans and a high risk of hospitalisation.

When she joined Landmark, Levy heard that the company was working on a telemedicine app. Two and a half years later, she still hadn’t seen anything. It turns out developing proprietary software that complies with the privacy provisions of the US’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA, is a time-consuming process. So far, the company has pilot programmes running in only a couple of markets.