Leveraging Telehealth to Improve Access to Rare and Complex Disease Care

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Peter Ax, CEO of UpScriptHealth, discusses the future of telehealth and its potential to revolutionize healthcare. He highlights the increasing complexity of cases being handled through telehealth platforms, including specialized treatments and diagnostic testing.

Ax emphasizes the importance of streamlining access to care and reducing administrative burdens for patients and providers. He discusses the role of telehealth in addressing the challenges of prior authorizations and ensuring timely access to medications.

The conversation also touches on the impact of the DEA's recent extensions for telehealth prescribing of controlled substances, which is expected to expand access to various treatments, including sleep aids, weight loss medications, and men's health products.

Furthermore, Ax discusses the potential of AI to enhance telehealth services, from improving patient communication to predicting future healthcare needs. He acknowledges the challenges of navigating a complex regulatory landscape and advocates for a more streamlined and unified approach to telehealth regulations.

How do you envision the role of telehealth in expanding access to care for patients with complex or rare diseases, particularly those requiring specialized treatments or monitoring?

Our business model is working with pharmaceutical companies, bringing medications, devices, products, direct to the patient. And what we've seen evolving in the past couple of years, and this is really accelerating, is going from prescribing a relatively simple medication for a finite population to now a much broader use of our platform where we're getting involved in a lot of very complicated cases. So for example, in the past year, we've launched a platform to provide esophageal cancer testing and screening where patients can go online, meet with the clinician, determine if they should be if they're a high risk category that would need to be screened for esophageal cancer, and then they can be prescribed that test, and then they go to a center, spend a couple of minutes at the center to have the test done, and the results then are online and available to the clinician who treated the patient originally.

In addition, we've recently launched a platform for ViiV which is a prep type product for HIV, preventative product where patient needs to receive a blood test and with immediate results from that blood test be given, if they're appropriate for the product, be given an injection at an ASOC, at an alternative site of care, and we've had to integrate with various alternative sites of care. We're working on some infusion care solutions. So, the point is, the use cases for telemedicine and a direct to patient platform are expanding very dramatically, and we're feeling it in all the discussions we're having with pharma.