Medici review

Medici is the brainchild of Clinton Phillips, the founder, and current CEO of the organization. It responds to the frustration of many clinicians that 73% of clinicians hear from their patients after business hours, and while significant time gets devoted to corresponding with patients via phone, email, and text, there is no expectation of getting paid from these activities. Medici provides a ready to go solution to this challenging problem, so patients can get the care they need, and doctors can monetize these activities.

• You can learn more about Medici here

Features

Many patients are turning to telehealth visits for their healthcare needs, whether for the convenience of not leaving home or work, or for their safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. While some patients turn to dedicated telehealth services, others would like the option of a telehealth visit with their established provider.

Couple that with medical providers, who often get a number of calls and texts from their patients during late nights and weekends. On top of that, being unable to see what is going on with the patient, many of these off hours phone calls end with a recommendation from the doctor for the patient to proceed to the emergency room.

Medici seeks to address this need of practices that wish to provide telehealth visits to their existing patients. This company provides a platform with robust functionality, including integrated billing when more definitive care is provided, along with satisfying the patient and not giving them reason to seek care outside of your practice.

The Medici platform is designed for ease of use. Patients can contact their providers with a text message, which is ideal with younger patients. It is also set up well for the clinician that can be in direct contact with the patient, without the expense of an answering service, and as it runs through the app, there is no need for the physician to give out their number directly to patients. In cases where it is needed, the text can then proceed to a video consultation for the patient.

With a telehealth video visit, definitive care can be rendered. This includes writing prescriptions as the Medici platform supports ePrescribing. Even communicating with a patient who only speaks a foreign language can be done with ease as there is included Chat Translate. This feature allows the clinician to correspond with a patient via the text message function of the app, and for real time translation to occur, in no less than twenty different languages.

Drawbacks

The Medici app on the Google Play store garners plenty of positive reviews, with a rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars for the provider version of the app. A shortcoming is that while patients can send their provider messages, there is no notification, nor is there a counter, like for email or instant messaging, to indicate the number of waiting messages.

The companion app for patients also has a positive rating, at 4 out of 5 stars with some reviews thanking that now they could see and talk to their physician without an office visit. Some users did have issues with entering their pharmacy data, or setting up the app as they did not realize that a mobile phone number was required for verification on initial setup. 

Support

There is support from Medici for both providers, and for patients. It includes an extensive FAQ, that covers most issues that would be encountered in use. Furthermore, there is a fairly comprehensive list of ‘How To Videos’ that can walk new users through using the Medici product.

The lack of other options for support is of concern. We could not find any phone number to contact for support- toll free or otherwise. Additionally, there is in fact an email address that can be used to contact for support, but it was kind of hidden in one of the videos, and not displayed elsewhere that we found. In fact, in the video, it went on to show the FAQ and encourage using that method, so clearly Medici is not encouraging email as a method of support.

There is also a lack of chat, and no online portal for obtaining support.

Pricing

It would appear that clinicians are left to price their services via Medici as they see fit. This is generally about $40 (£32) to $50 (£40) per 30 minutes of support.

For providers, there is a choice of three different tiers of plans, although pricing is not provided. The lowest tier is the Connect plan, which includes such features as unlimited text messages, group messaging, patient importing, and malpractice insurance. The middle tier, dubbed Treat, adds to this package ePrescriptions, video and audio consultations and billed consultations, making this an essential upgrade. The top tier, Grow, adds premium support and marketing, auto chat translations, and is available to new patients.

While we appreciate the three tier approach, we would recommend the middle tier for those considering as the lowest tier is missing too many features, and the top tier’s added functions seem to be superfluous.

Final verdict

Medici is a powerful platform that fosters clinician’s ability to connect with their patients, via both texts and video chat. The pros include the real time text translation, the mobile apps, the integrated billing with the flexibility for the clinician to set their own pricing, and the choice of provider plan tiers. The drawbacks include the opaque pricing, the capability of the lowest tier offered that leaves out important functions like ePrescribe, and the limited support options with an almost hidden email address and no phone number.

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