A West Coast hospital system is buying a digital healthcare development and services company to bring back an old school medical staple: doctor house calls.

Providence St. Joseph Health yesterday acquired Medicast Inc. for an undisclosed price. Providence St. Joseph Health is a not-for-profit health and social services system formed by the July 6 merger of Providence Health & Services in Burbank, Calif., and St. Joseph Health in Seattle.

Medicast is a three-year-old digital healthcare company that develops and markets mobile apps and home healthcare services that enable consumers to schedule a doctor house call. Over time, we realized the importance of working more closely with health systems and collaborating with them as a means of launching innovative at-home care services that would be powered by the Medicast platform, but offered under a health systems brand and provided by its own caregivers, says Medicast co-founder and CEO Sam Zebarjadi.

Medicast will now become part of the Providence St. Joseph Health strategy and innovations business group. Providence St. Joseph Health, which operates 16 acute care hospitals, home health agencies, hospice care, outpatient services, skilled nursing facilities, community clinics and physician groups in California and Washington, acquired Medicast to offer more home-based health services, Zebarjadi says.

We learned that healthcare experiences should not be purely transactional, but that house calls should be a part of a broader continuum of careone delivered by health systems with a trusted brand and vast provider network, and more importantly, one that patients could go to for all of their healthcare needs beyond a single primary or urgent care episode, Zebarjadi says in a blog post.

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The acquisition also gives Providence St. Joseph Health an opportunity to operate in the emerging digital healthcare niche of web-based and at-home doctor appointment scheduling and follow-up services. Providence Health & Services has been offering doctor house calls in the Los Angeles-area communities of Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Westwood, Brentwood, West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Cheviot Hills, Venice, Mar Vista, Marina Del Rey, Culver City, Playa Vista and Westchester.

Consumers can request a house call from a doctor via the Medicast iPhone, iPad or Android app. Medicast says a doctor will go to the users home, office, or hotel within two hours and spend at least 30 minutes with the patient. All doctors are screened and certified.

Medicast isnt releasing many details such as the number of doctors in its network, number of house calls to date or annual sales, but most home visits are for relatively minor healthcare issues such as colds, fever, ear, nose and throat problems, upset stomach, flu, joint or back pain, skin conditions, respiratory and other walk-in clinic types of treatment. Medicast providers also offer various healthcare screenings such as for blood pressure.

Pricing for a digital house call starts at $199 but can range higher based on the type of treatment sought, Providence St. Joseph Health says. The Medicast platform dispatches doctors based on such factors as proximity, traffic, symptoms, and provider gender or language preference. The technology captures utilization, clinical and billing data at the point of care. Medicast also can be integrated with most major hospital electronic health record and billing systems, Zebarjadi says.

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Medicast is among the growing number of digital start-ups s in the home healthcare services market, which research firms McKinsey & Co. says generates about $68 billion in annual revenue. Others include ZestHealth.com, DocBookMD.com and DrChrono.com

 

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