The Power To Eliminate Barriers to Women’s Healthcare with Telemedicine
By Gloria Lau
Gloria Lau is CEO of Alpha Medical in Palo Alto, Calif.
Women face the greatest barriers to healthcare. Research has indicated that most primary healthcare training programs don’t equip providers to address women’s healthcare needs; for example, only 9% of medical schools offer women’s health courses or electives. This, in addition to barriers around time, economic inequity, racial disparities, and geographical isolation, contributes to the lack of accessible and affordable healthcare.
I moved from Hong Kong to the U.S. when I was 18. New life chapters unfolded, including becoming a mother. It wasn’t until I was navigating care for my youngest child that I learned about the difficulties within the U.S. healthcare system. The more I talked with other moms, colleagues and friends, the clearer it became that women almost exclusively shoulder the burden in the healthcare world.
I wanted to rebuild the healthcare system for women.
Alpha Medical was formed with the goal of providing access to quality medical care — regardless of whether you have insurance, or are close to a doctor or pharmacy. Alpha is an asynchronous telemedicine platform which means that we don’t communicate with patients in real time, but through our HIPAA encrypted platform. Feedback shows that many of our patients prefer asynchronous conversations since they eliminate much of the anxiety that comes with seeing a provider in office.
Telemedicine represents a potential paradigm shift from a patient seeing a provider based on a provider's availability to a provider seeing a patient at the patient’s convenience. It can decrease disparities in healthcare based on race, socioeconomic status, age, geography, language, gender, disability status, citizenship status, and sexual orientation.
Telemedicine has the ability to solve problems like fragmented healthcare and increasing costs. Achieving these goals requires commitments to ethics over profit and a coordinated approach to make broadband available to our rural and impoverished communities.
““I wanted to rebuild the healthcare system for women. Alpha Medical was formed with the goal of providing access to quality medical care — regardless of whether you have insurance, or are close to a doctor or pharmacy.” Gloria Lau, CEO @helloalphaMD #PowerToChangeStories” ”
Gloria Lau is CEO of Alpha Medical. @helloalphaMD; https://www.instagram.com/helloalphamd/ ; https://www.helloalpha.com/