Patient Office Visits, Phreesia Style

Shorter Phreesia, the first company to provide a free and substantially more useful patient check-in solution in a doctor's waiting room:

You, the doctor, provide the captive audience.

We, Phreesia, provide a free touch-screen pad and enough pharma ads to make us all [who aren't doctors or patients] rich.

I don't think so! Blasting patients with pharma ads does not a pre-visit personalized interactive patient interview in [my] waiting room make.

A first visit, when you're trying to establish a rapport with the patient, gather information, figure out what the problem is and devise a plan of treatment is not the appropriate time for third party commercial endeavors.

I don't have any experience with Phreesia, nor do I know anyone who has. It's just that something about the concept rubs me the wrong way. A lot of bells and whistles to mask the underlying business model: Pharmas pay a middleman to serve their ads to vulnerable people in an inappropriate setting.

I mean, why not just cut out the middleman, pay the doctor directly and have him/her deluge the poor patient with ads. Speaking of which, have I mentioned that there's quite some down time (literally) during a gyn exam and a whole celling begging for a pharma ad projection. [If interested, call me! Lots o' wall space at reasonable rates!]

That's my first impression of Phreesia. What's yours?

Psst, Wanna Sample Some Free Pills

A study of prescription use of nearly 33,000 U.S. residents during 2003 found that the neediest are least likely to get free samples:

"Our findings suggest the free samples serve as a marketing tool, not a safety net," said Dr. Sarah Cutrona, co-author of the report to be published in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

I have to tell you that the findings of this study are far removed from my experience. From the first days of internship, when I learned from senior residents to hoard Lupron samples ($400/shot) in my locker to give to uninsured patients, to clinic days when we used to stuff all the available drawers with free OCP samples*, I'm hard pressed to come up with a single example when the free samples were used as a marketing tool.

Our patients could barely afford the trip to the clinic; spending money on the latest or trendiest OCP just wasn't an option for them.

*[Even when we were no longer allowed to keep free samples in the clinic (possibly, one of the most counterproductive regulation ever), we still managed to supply our patients with OCPs from, you guessed it, the free supply of samples.]