Imagine no longer having to waste time in your overcrowded GP waiting room where your child’s colds drag you down every four mornings. It’s the bet of a Toulouse start-up who wants to revolutionize teleconsultation. No more need to find a cabin: she is the one who comes to the house. Thanks to a new connected box, the doctor will be able to listen to your heart or lungs live, on its monitoring screen.
In addition to the “classic” constants (heart rate, blood pressure, temperature and oxygen level), an “otoscope” – this small top-headed device that the doctor uses to see inside your ears – will even allow him to look at your throat or your eardrums using a tiny precision camera. Pierre-Henri Gorioux, general practitioner in Toulouse, has several times tested this “miniature, transportable, inexpensive and above all very easy to use teleconsultation cabin”, and he hopes to use it soon with his patients.
A “medical practice that fits in your hand”
If teleconsultation has become well democratized during the Covid-19 period, the device is the first to bring together so many connected devices in a box barely larger than a telephone. Rechargeable on battery, it should be marketed this summer on teleconsultation platforms such as Doctolib or Mesdocteurs. Patients might also have access to it in pharmacies, nursing homes and even businesses.
Chronically ill, fragile population, employees or parents who lack time… “the public is everyone”, sums up Sébastien Risler. He too, a father, experienced the pangs of crowded waiting rooms and impossible to find appointments before founding Doc2u with two partners. He estimates that “from a technical point of view, 80% of consultations might be switched remotely, even if this figure does not take into account the human link and the social role of the doctor”.
Partners think big. They target the international market and provide other indicators to allow early detection of diseases, particularly cardiovascular. But telemedicine also has its limits and Sébastien Risler is well aware of this: “On some platforms, we have seen doctors open teleconsultation slots every five minutes. It is absurd! Conversely, it seems just as arbitrary to limit them to 20% of distance acts. According to him, the system should rather tend to appreciate the acts at their true value, “for example by staggering the tariffs, according to the time spent and the means used by the practitioner”, he proposes.