American Well CEO on how it plans to turn bedrooms into hospitals

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Good afternoon, readers.

Imagine you’ve just had serious surgery. You’re ready to leave the hospital, but not quite ready to go back to your everyday life. And so you need to get periodic checkups from your doctor or nurse practitioner.

Trekking back and forth from the hospital would be a (literal) pain. And, depending on your age, using an iPad or computer may be beyond your technological grasp. But what if the doctors and clinicians came straight into your bedroom—and you didn’t have to do anything at all?

That’s the technology that telehealth giant American Well is developing and expects to deploy sometime in 2020, CEO Roy Schoenberg tells Fortune in an exclusive interview.

“This is a new service that is tied into the American Well ecosystem. It’s a device that gets mounted on top of the TV in front of the patient in their home, has the ability to take over the TV when the clinician wants to come in… Making the bedroom of the patient a hospital room,” he says.

The details are a bit sparse, since both the underlying product itself and the logistics behind its use (such as setting it up in an elderly patient’s home) still need to be worked out. But, as Schoenberg tells it, the (as-of-yet unnamed) device would be able to connect to a TV or webcam. A medical professional could switch the patient’s TV from, say, CNN over to a direct video feed to a doctor.

What’s more, this service would allow clinicians to home in on vital signs and biometrics by zooming in on a patient via webcam, allowing for a much better view. Wirelessly connected microphones and the device’s capability to link up with wireless tech (such as blood pressure monitors) could deliver critical information to health care providers in real time with minimum effort required from the patient.

American Well envisions partnerships with insurers and hospitals who will see the value incentive of treating chronically ill or recovering patients remotely.

“As a patient, the likely way in 2020 is, when you’re in the hospital, the discharge planning will give you this device, and then there’s going to be different ways of helping you set this up in your home,” says Schoenberg.

He also cautions that the rollout, as with much in health care, will be a process. But the current plan is to get it out into the real world this year.

Read on for the day’s news.

Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy

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