It’s 2:35am on Wednesday morning and you wake up with a sore throat. Sadly, none of your normal attempts of cough drops, gargling with salt water or sipping tea are helping to alleviate the pain. What do you do?

Traditionally, you would wait until 8 or 9am to call your doctor, try and set up a same day appointment (fingers crossed!), commute to their office, wait for your appointment and get a prescription. Or, you could go to an Urgent Care type of facility and wait 30 minutes to two hours to see a doctor there. But neither of these situations are ideal with how cruddy you’re feeling.

Fortunately for us, health insurance providers like Regence BlueShield are adopting a telehealth option that would eliminate the need to wait to see your doctor. Regence currently offers a 24-hour nurse line for all members that lets you call in for help. But with telehealth (which Regence is currently offering to large groups and expanding in 2015), you can have the opportunity to see a doctor face to face at 2:30am from your computer or mobile device.

“Telehealth lets you get the medical attention you need, when and where you need it, at a lower cost. Telehealth visits can be as little as $40” says Csaba Mera, M.D., Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Regence BlueShield. “For a lot of people, that’s the amount of their co-pay. And for people with high-deductible plans and health savings accounts, that’s a significant saving when accounting for first dollar out of pocket costs”.

Think about it – instead of calling your doctor’s office at 9am, you could be heading straight to your pharmacy to pick up medicine. The amount of time it will take you to feel better will be shortened and you’ll spend less on your appointment! It sounds like a win-win for a lot of people who need basic care (sore throat, pink eye, flu, etc).

With more companies beginning to adopt this type of service and technology continuing to evolve to bring better support to patients, it’s only a matter of time before telehealth becomes the norm. To get the conversation going within your organization, consider checking out this article from Regence BlueShield, this article from Healthcare IT News and this article on how Medicare is adopting this technology.