Case study: Denmark’s informal and formal telemedicine market
How many doctors are using Skype and other vanilla, publicly available platforms and how many are adopting built for purpose telehealth solutions? This Danish data gives some indication of the likely split between the only officially recommended solution and what are likely to be vanilla, publicly available platforms.
The Danish doctors union has historically been hostile to the introduction of telemedicine but at the beginning of the process rolled out Min Læge in conjunction with the Danish regions and recommended that the country’s use the solution while the pandemic is ongoing.
The Praktiserende Lægers Organisation (PLO) tells HBI: “We don’t know how many video consultations take place on other platforms but our impression is that the vast majority take place through Min Læge.”
The data shows that doctors slowly adopted the Min Læge platform over March and April, but that the number of video consultations on the platform has fallen steadily from the week beginning April 20. HBI expects that this reflects a drop in the total number of video consultations as doctors started to restart face-to-face consultations and not a move back away to other solutions.
A number of countries, from Austria to Romania, have introduced remote consultation tariffs either permanently or temporarily but so far it’s been difficult to measure whether doctors have migrated to specific telemedicine solutions, or have used informal setups like Skype, Zoom or even telephone calls.
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