Female-Focused, Video-Free Telehealth – Varsha Rao, CEO of Nurx

Telehealth has emerged as one of the biggest “winners” of the pandemic if you measure that in terms of a huge jump in awareness and amount of use. People most often associate it with video conversations, but telehealth also includes phone calls, remote monitoring, emails and sharing of images. Our guest on this episode of Raise the Line thinks there are real advantages to patients in actually foregoing video in favor of an asynchronous exchange of information. Varsha Rao is CEO of Nurx, a rapidly growing health tech company which has its roots in the prescribing and at-home delivery of contraception. “There's a lot of people who still don't feel that comfortable talking about contraception with their provider. One thing we've tried to do is create modalities that reduce friction, whether it's stigma or logistics, because those can be barriers to care.” Rao says patients feel more comfortable asking sensitive questions in writing, and benefit from the deep experience Nurx providers have on the limited health concerns they treat. “We've really focused in a number of areas and gone deep in them. That’s why we get thousands of comments from patients saying they learned more from our providers than they ever got from their in-person doctors.” Check out this episode to learn more about a different take on telehealth. If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast