October 17, 2024
According to State Health, the telehealth GLP-1 boom wouldn’t be possible without clinicians willing to write prescriptions for those hundreds of thousands of patients. Companies are rarely transparent — with patients or the public — about the medical groups behind the screens. But a STAT examination found that just a handful of networks of doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants are writing prescriptions for dozens of websites offering the weight loss drugs, including the compounded versions that have been the subject of conflict and debate among clinicians and industry members.
Telehealth companies have been able to start operating literally in a few days by “renting” the services of these medical groups, which have established themselves as an invisible but critical part of the puzzle of the GLP-1 market. This online gold rush, however, could put patients at risk.
Four of these medical groups are:
Beluga Health
OpenLoop
MD Integrations
Colchis Medical Group
Behind the scenes, just a few networks of clinicians are writing prescriptions for a large number of websites, STAT’s Katie Palmer reports. Some of the sites do not disclose that they don’t employ the clinicians that patients see in visits that often resemble a commercial transaction as much as they do health care. Experts said the lucrative arrangements raise a number of concerns.
This is a humongous red flag. In this scenario, the incentives are so misaligned that one can’t imagine it would not be rife with abuse and profit-driven prescribing, rather than medical prescribing.
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