Subject Matter Minute, Episode #17 – Telehealth

Welcome to another Subject Matter Minute, I’m Matt Nagy… thanks for joining me.

So, I wasn’t sure how people would receive last month’s episode on mindfulness meditation, and while it was the first episode that I had a thumbs down, I think it also got the most thumbs up initially. So thanks and I hope some of you try it out.

Today I was gonna talk a little bit about the tornado that happened a couple of weeks ago in Laramie… it was a doozy, and it was amazing. But after losing a few hours of sleep last night, I thought I’d get a little more personal.

As you guys know, I have a couple teenagers, and I’m sure a lot of you out there have teenagers. We’ve given them a fairly late curfew and they’ve been pushing it by staying out every single night to their curfew, and we’re getting a little tired of never seeing them. I mean, I assume that’s normal of teens… So we made this little rule this summer where we wanted them to stay home two nights a week…  not too big of a deal you’d think, but my older daughter was grousing about it yesterday, and then she was saying she was gonna go to bed, and she said good night, and and that’s extremely unusual because my wife and I go to bed fairly early. So I got suspicious. I set my alarm for midnight, and got up and went up checked on younger daughter… she was there. Looked in on the older daughter and it seemed like she was in bed, and I was like okay, great, started walking away, and then moments later I was like, wait a second, my younger daughter had fooled me before with pillows in the bed. I kid you not. So, I went back in there, and sure enough… I pulled the covers back and it was a bunch of pillows lined up in the bed!

I just texted her, said get your butt home, check in when you get home. I thought, they are teenagers, so I was trying not to be too worked up, since it was only midnight. She’s out to midnight all the time anyways. But, on the other hand, I couldn’t go to sleep.

She came home not too much longer, and I just said go to bed. I couldn’t go to sleep for like three hours… so it was one of those things where I’d try some music, I tried going to the TV room and watching some dumb TV,

but turns out it was new episodes of Parks and Rec or at least ones I hadn’t seen, and so that didn’t work. Finally I got back into bed and was able to sleep… so that’s an aside I guess, but dealing with teenagers, you know…

I got to say I snuck out a few times or several times when I was a kid, but it was a lot harder for me. We lived like five miles out of town and I had a quarter-mile driveway, so I couldn’t just drive out. I had to get picked up after walking down the field. My wife and I sleep in the basement, and we sleep hard, so they can just walk out the front door!

We’re pretty lenient parents, so you’d hope maybe that would mean that they could follow a couple rules… mm-hmm, ya know no matter what the rules are, they need more. So any comments down below to make me feel better would be great.

Enough about that that was long! Today I want to talk about something that I used once, and it’s a great health benefit… today we’re going to talk about telehealth.

[Music]

Before we get started on Telehealth, I want to thank Kimberly for the information for mindfulness meditation last month… thank you very much. I think it went over well, Kimberly.

This month’s subject matter expert is Ralph Hayes of EGI. He helped me out with some details that I was unsure of… thanks Ralph.

So Telehealth… what is it? It’s basically having a doctor’s appointment through your computer or through your mobile phone. It’s great for a lot of instances… so is it hard to get an appointment with your doctor or at least in a timely manner? Do you not want to go wait in the waiting room and then wait in the little room even longer, to get to talk to your doctor? Perhaps you’re on the road on vacation or for business, or it’s the middle of the night and you have something that you think isn’t an emergency, but you’d still like to talk to a doctor about?

This is what Telehealth is for… and to boot, it’s cheap! The cost for Telehealth is $42.

That’s one thing about Telehealth… you have to pay upfront. When you’re going through the process, you put your credit card in, but the $42 will go towards your deductible, and if your deductible is met, it’s a 75% coinsurance. That means that of the $42, they’ll pay 75%… you’re only going to pay 25%. You’re gonna pay $10.50 for a doctor’s appointment!

Now obviously this is Telehealth… if you have a giant gash across your chest or your your arm’s hanging at a 90-degree angle, you don’t go to Telehealth. You go to the emergency room or somewhere else. But for all those little things that you sometimes maybe don’t go to the doctor for, but maybe you should… the colds, the rashes, the ear infections, those kinds of things… this is perfect for it, and $10.50! Right?

I mentioned there’s two ways you can do this… on your computer or on your mobile device. There’s two providers that work with Cigna, and they’re called MDLive for Cigna, and Amwell for Cigna. The best way to do it on the computer is to log into your Cigna, and then go through there, which I’ll show you in a little bit. You can also use the mobile apps. If you get the mobile apps you need to make sure that they say “for Cigna.” So, “MDLive for Cigna” or “Amwell for Cigna,” because that’s where you’ll get your price difference. There may be some other apps out there that they use, so it needs to say “for Cigna.”

I’m gonna go ahead and show you how to do it… at least how to get there on your computer, and how to get there on your mobile device. I can’t go all the way through it because I don’t want to talk to a doctor today, but I can least get you started. And like I said, I’ve done it before… I had a little rash on my leg that was there for, I don’t know, nine months? Finally, I decided to try this Telehealth thing out. Sure enough, logged in it was really easy… talked to a doctor, he prescribed some ointment, took care of it in two weeks… I was thrilled. It was very easy.

Let’s do this on a computer first. First of all, just go to myCigna.com and login. There are two providers, like I mentioned, and I’ve already used one of them so you’ll see there’s a difference if you’ve used them before or if you haven’t.

Go to “find providers and costs,” go down to “Cigna Telehealth connection,” and here are the two providers. Here’s a nice feature too… you could also talk to a nurse first for free to see what they think, see if you should move on to a doc. I’ve used Amwell before, so I’m gonna show you one that you haven’t used.

Click “get started”… make sure you have pop up blockers off, because it does open a new window.

It takes you to MDLive for Cigna. You have to activate your account, then choose a doctor, then resolve your issue. Let’s activate an account.

This is the kind of stuff you’re going have to fill out… have your signature ID number ready, and then after this (I am assuming, since it’s been a little while since I did it) you’d have to fill out your credit card information.

So this is what you would do if you have not used it before. Now let’s go back and do one that has been used before. Click ‘get started.’ Now typically,  even if you’ve used it before, it’ll have you put in your phone number twice and then take you to this screen.

So if you used it before, you’ll get here and you’ll see that you can get started with the first available provider or you can weed through the doctors and read their bios and decide on one. During the day there are a lot of them. I did mine in the evening and there was fewer available, and I did hear of an instance from somebody where there wasn’t someone available on one provider so they went to the other provider to find somebody. So that might be one reason you have to switch.

That’s how you get into it and start the process on your computer. Now let’s go through the process on your mobile device. I can only show you on an iPhone, because that’s what I own, but I’m sure it’s the same on other devices. First of all, you’ll need to download the app or the apps. I go to the App Store and I search for it, and I found MDLive for Cigna here and then let’s go back and search for Amwell for Cigna as well.

So I would tap ‘get’… you download both to your phone. Once you have them on your phone you can go ahead and click on MDLive here. When you use MDLive or Amwell for the first time, you’ll have a screen like this where you can either log in or sign up.

I’m going to click ‘sign up’ on the bottom and then it takes you to a screen just like the website, where you can ‘activate now.’

We’re gonna click on that… same stuff as on the website… you’ll need your customer ID, and you fill that out and create an account. I’m not going do that right now, but then next time you just use your username and password to log in.

That’s another episode of the Subject Matter Minute! Thanks for joining me… hopefully you guys can get out there and use this Telehealth for those minor things. I think it’s a great benefit and I think it saves everybody money. I’ll see you next time.