Our private medical provider has offered virtual GP services alongside our insurance offering and we are preparing to launch the addition in early October. If you have this benefit in place, or have experience using it, I would love to hear your feedback - what have you found are the benefits? Do you offer it linked to your private medical insurance cover or not? If not, how successful has it been? What are the restrictions/limitations you've faced? What take-up have you had? Have you any comment on the fees charged for prescriptions and their delivery, if your service offers this?
All input much appreciated!
We arranged a 3 month free trial via our Health cash plan Provider BHSF and the response was fantastic and so we went ahead.
It has proved popular and valued - one of the few benefits that I regularly get unsolicited positive feedback about and yet the cost was relatively low.
I would advise shopping around as found vast differences in costs for this type of service.
I haven't found a particular link to our private medical plan , think this can stand alone as part of overall health/wellbeing package. Biggest plus for employees seems to be convenience, timing and that the Drs spend a lot more time with them than their usual GP! Can recommend the GP service with BHSF.
I've had two experiences of virtual GP services - the first time was in a large organisation and although was managed by our PMI provider, the service was accessed directly through the virtual GP platform. You had to be a member of our PMI scheme to get access. It was well utilised and we received positive feedback.
I have recently (3 months ago) rolled out this service in my current organisation, but this time it is accessed via our PMI provider's app which also incorporates other features such as health questionnaires, articles etc. This has been made available to everyone, regardless of whether they are enrolled in the PMI.
The experience of this latter roll-out has been very poor. There has been a series of technical issues as well as 'user errors' on the part of the PMI provider. As a result, very few people have bothered to download the app, and then even fewer have utilised any element of it. I would caveat that this is the app as a whole, rather than specific issues with the virtual GP element within the app.
We introduced this at the start if this year as part of our employee health and wellbeing policies. Take up is around 10% of eligible employees so far. Feedback from those that have used the Online GP is overwhelmingly positive. It' s hard to get people to engage with this but once they do the experience is very positive. One thing to be aware of is that prescriptions are private prescriptions charged at the actual cost of medication. Whilst in some cases this can be lower than NHS it is often more. Hope this help.
We have it through our healthcare provider - where employees can also use their "personal health fund" to pay for private prescriptions. My own opinion is a little mixed. take up is not massive, but those that have tried it are usually very impressed and re-use. That said i am not sure i could justify the price of purchasing it separately if it was not offered by our healthcare partner.