Home » Interview with Damian Kissane – founder of VideoDoc

Interview with Damian Kissane – founder of VideoDoc

While nothing will ever beat physically seeing a doctor, technology is paving way to allowing more and more people being diagnosed without the need to do so. VideoDoc is one such service. Through their app based live doctor sessions, they allow you to talk to a doctor, as and when you want. With a reasonably cheap subscription based service, anybody and everybody can subscribe. We recently had a chance to talk to Damian Kissane, one of the founder of VideoDoc. Read our full interview below. 

Why have you created VideoDoc?

The two co-founders, Damian Kissane and Mary O’Brien, saw first-hand the convenience for patients and incredible flexibility for doctors from video consultations while working in the US and resolved to launch a service in the UK and Ireland that would similarly advantage busy doctors and patients.

There are a lot of limitations between the service offered on a phone/via app vs a physical doctor examining. How do you feel VideoDoc addresses this?

Ensuring the patients receive safe, effective, responsive and well-led care is our priority. When appropriate patients are always referred to their primary GP and we encourage every patient to have their own primary GP.  Is a physical doctor visit required?  Seeing a patient by video on VideoDoc will always be much better than a consultation over the telephone and for the majority of presenting complaints equally effective to in person.  VideoDoc is a complimentary service for everyday ailments and complaints which represent over 70% of what GPs typically see. We are not a substitute or replacement for emergency services.

How do you see this fit between NHS and the private offerings in the UK?

We are passionate about the NHS and everything that it does. We share our technology with the NHS and see our services as complementary to the work of the NHS GPs. We share information with patients consent with their own primary caregivers and as a result enable those doctors to continue to provide the continuity of NHS care.  We are proud to work with and support the NHS.

Will you ever have any brick and mortar presence? 

We are a complimentary service to the NHS and GPs working in practice. It is difficult to envisage why we would want to own GP surgeries in the current model of healthcare in the UK. Perhaps we are different, we don’t feel we are a substitute or in competition with doctors.

What does the future for VideoDoc look like?

We are continuing to evolve our own clinical pathways to develop the scope of services offered by VideoDoc. We are expanding our services into wellness as well as serving partners internationally.

Will you work in collaboration with consultants?

We are already working with consultants in hospitals to prevent admission and re-admission, we welcome every consultant to collaborate with us to expand the accessibility of their own areas of speciality.  Separately, we already provide our technology platform to the NHS contracts and work with consultants and now therapists in the UK and in a variety of disciplines.

Will you work in collaboration with medical insurers?

We already work closely with medical insurers and are keen to share our knowledge and experience with providers.  VideoDoc’s platform creates an unmatched degree of clinical transparency which enables us to observe and analyse in real time presenting complaints, diagnosis and outcomes. We analyse every detail of our consultations, for example, the time to arrive at a diagnosis and the specific plan recommended by the doctor.  Some people might call this big data, we call it patient care.

 

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