Plum Telehealth—The Journey So Far

2022 has been all about big changes and growth for Plum Telehealth. Right from bringing the entire Telehealth journey on the app to crafting specialised healthcare plans for our users to building our doctor ecosystem, this year has seen it all.

Plum Telehealth—the inception

Telehealth began as emergency relief during the second wave of Covid-19 in 2021. Until now, Plum’s goals had centred around health insurance and its related benefits.

However, the time had come for us to go further for our customers in terms of healthcare. This is where Telehealth came into the picture. It started small, more like an experiment, with 5 General Practitioners (GPs), and we received around 25 consults a day. Within the first few months of running these efforts, the number of consults shot up to 100+ daily. A high NPS (Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer satisfaction) of 70+ was also recorded.

A handpicked team of Telehealth doctors

The doctors at Plum Telehealth are the face of the initiative and interact most closely with our users. Our community of doctors has grown from the 5 doctors we started with, and we are 60 doctors strong today. Bringing in more doctors and, in turn, more expertise has given us countless insights into improving Telehealth.

A goal that emerged from such insightful discussions with doctors has been to provide round-the-clock services to our customers. In 2021, we worked only with GPs, who were available 20 hours a day. Today, our customers can speak to the GPs 24/7 and book an appointment in under 10 minutes.

Focusing on speciality care, we decided to expand into the area by the end of 2021. We first introduced 11 specialities, some of them being ENT, Dermatology, and OB-GYN. We continued integrating more specialities this year, mental health and internal medicine, to name a few.

Today, Plum Telehealth houses 20+ specialties, and all our specialists are available from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.

Our telehealth data from the past 7 months shows that 60% of consultation bookings come from the mental health speciality. Among these mental health consults, 77% of the consults comprised young adults between 21 and 30. This was as much a surprise to us as it might be to you! The global and economic climate this year could have contributed to this. Perhaps it was the increased mental health awareness among the generation or the simple fact of mental health services being much more expensive in other places. 

There have been other unique additions to our list of specialities. With a rise in pet-related benefits offered by different insurance agents, we decided to roll out pet telehealth consultations in March 2022. This offering has provided care to more than 350 pets since then.

Going beyond the consultations, one of our most prominent engagement strategies with users has been conducting AMAs (Ask Me Anything) and interactive sessions led by our doctors. Some of the most popular session themes were Covid-19, monkeypox, and pediatric nutrition.

Building Telehealth in-house

Pivoting to an engineering perspective, we kicked off Plum Telehealth in a low-key manner on that front as well. For the first two years, operations were run with tools such as Calendly and Google Meet. Scaling up Telehealth and touching more lives was also big on our list of things to accomplish.

So, we decided to build our own Plum Telehealth experience on the app entirely from scratch this year! 2022 saw the conception and launch of this in-house telehealth product as well, made from 2 years and 50,000+ consults worth of learnings. 

Today, the entire journey from choosing your doctor to the 1:1 consultation to accessing the doctor’s prescription is all on the app. Not limiting an enhanced app experience to our users, Plum Telehealth doctors also have an elevated app journey now. It is much easier to track appointments on the app for doctors. Managing rosters and payouts has also never been simpler. Read more about what’s changed with the all-new Telehealth.

The Future of Plum Telehealth

An exciting announcement to look forward to in the Telehealth space is the introduction of pay-per-consult, where customers can purchase their consultation sessions and pay as they go.

The robustness with which the Telehealth system is running will give us the ability to impact 300,000+ lives and bring on board more doctors to support this growth in the coming year.

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