Florida Health System Includes Telehealth With the House Warming Gift
Baptist Health is partnering with a South Florida home builder to include a direct-to-consumer telehealth service - accessed through a telemedicine kit - with every new house sold.
A Florida housebuilder is selling telehealth with new homes, aiming to capitalize on the trend toward home-based connected health.
CC Homes, based on Coral Gables, has partnered with Baptist Health to include telehealth with homes purchased in its Canarias at Downtown Doral project in Miami and Maple Ridge development in Ave Maria, as well as future projects. Some 200 units in the development of 343 single-family homes and 52 townhouses have been sold in the Canarias at Downtown Doral project, with each buyer receiving a TytoHome telemedicine kit alongside the keys to the house.
“We are all focused on the pandemic,” Jim Carr, founder and principal of CC Homes and chairman of the board at Baptist Health, told the Miami Herald. “You can’t say one factor sells houses. It’s all the little things that add up that help sells homes. This is just one of those little things.”
It’s not the first effort to pair direct-to-consumer telehealth services with unique retail opportunities. Two years ago and just a little ways up the coast, Hollywood’s Memorial Healthcare System signed partnerships with a pair of hotels to give guests in need of on-demand healthcare services access to the health system’s MemorialDOCNow platform.
“With this first-of-its-kind partnership, Memorial Healthcare System is providing a convenient, cost-effective alternative to emergency room or urgent care center visits for medical care for minor conditions and illnesses,” Bill Manzie, the health system’s Administrative Director of Telehealth Strategy, said at the time. “Now, tourists who are visiting Hollywood hotel and resort locations can have a consult with a physician with just a swipe of their finger.”
Aside from the expansion of pharmacy and retail health services, such as Walgreens’ new partnership with VillageMD, health systems are also taking a new look at telemedicine kiosks – with placements in locations as varied as senior living facilities, malls, oil rigs and cruise ships.
Baptist is also working to expand telehealth services at Belmont Village Senior Living’s new project in Coral Gables, and has plan to branch out even further.
“We are always looking for innovative ways to expand access to healthcare,” Lissette Egues, vice president of Baptist Outpatient Services, told the newspaper. “Aside from real estate developers, we have partnered with employers, hotels and senior living communities. The pandemic has shown the importance of leveraging technology to keep our community safe and healthy.”