The Virtual Meeting Coach

I’m one of the millions of Americans who has health insurance that doesn’t cover my care. I pay premiums every month. Big premiums. And HealthNet of Oregon denies my claims, classifying me as a “special case.” This has been going on since I moved to Oregon three years ago. What HealthNet is doing to me is nothing short of highway robbery and I resent the hell out it, not just for me but for the thousands of other Oregonians and Californians that HealthNet holds hostage because we’ve got “pre-existing conditions.” If we drop their coverage, we’ll be uninsurable. That means we pay the Mafia every month, or force our out-of-work neighbors and the gasping local hospitals to pay for our care.

At the President’s request, I thought I’d explain my predicament to my Oregon Congressman this morning on the chance that I might motivate Mr. Walden to support national healthcare reform. I drove up for a face-to-face meeting. Needless to say, he wasn’t in the office. And, his staff member – a person who told us she’s not actually part of his legislative staff – gave me and a handful of other folks a fully lukewarm welcome.

Then she spent most of our time together explaining to us in a decidedly patronizing voice why it wasn’t Greg Walden’s job to support legislation that he didn’t agree with. She listened to the needs and concerns I brought to share, but made no effort whatsoever to make even one written note although she said she’d tell the Congressman. So much for making a trip for a face-to-face meeting with my elected representative at 9:30am on a Wednesday morning.

My next best option is canceling my so-called “insurance” and forcing local tax rolls to absorb my care. Maybe my Republican Congressman would rather explain to Oregonians why they’ll have to pay new taxes – or cancel even more essential government services - instead of telling them what he’s doing to protect them from the cost of not giving people like me a way to participate in a national plan that enables us to remain responsible for ourselves.

I drove back to Ashland, shaking my head over the stone wall I ran into in my face-to-face meeting and, on the other hand, celebrating the excitement I’m feeling in recent online conversations around cost-saving telehealth, telemedicine, and digital doctoring initiatives.

It’s not part of my preventative care regimen to allow my blood to boil. So, after I return next week from a quick trip to the Bay Area, I’ll be following the path with a heart. For the next several weeks I’ll be focusing on the explosion of new medical applications for virtual meeting tools and other kinds of social media in the delivery of cost-effective healthcare and longterm care.

To wet your whistle, take a peek at this spiffy new site called Hello Health. Hello Health is a group of doctors setting up a simple way to serve their patients in web conferencing rooms while also trying to make it easy for other docs to work with them. What a concept! Based in NYC, they call themselves the “ground-up healthcare revolution.”

Welcome from Hello Health on Vimeo.

No gigantic bureaucracy. No death panels. No end of patient-doctor-relationship-scenarios. At Hello Health, all you have to do is “friend” another doc to give them access to your records.

Do you suppose this group’s got something to teach others about simple civility, collaboration, and creativity in meeting patient needs?

Do you suppose this could be generalized in some way to meet American’s political needs? Maybe they could show some of our Congressmen what it means to “friend” all their constituents. You think?