Talk To a Doctor Online For Free for medical help.
You can talk to a doctor online free through healthcare portals
There are several healthcare portals and medical forums out there where patients can talk to a doctor online for free or at reasonable charges to seek medical advice Such online medical help from qualified practitioners provided by the health portals has been a boon to many people in America who have been compelled to remain un-insured due to ever-increasing healthcare costs. This kind of online medical consultation for a second opinion for free or at affordable charges is also a good way to reduce expenses of the consumers in buying health insurance policies to take care of medical exigencies of their family. Some of these portals apart from providing free services of medical diagnosis online help the patients to get in touch with good licensed doctors for medical consultation online at their convenience besides helping them with lab testing.
How to talk to a doctor online for medical advice?
In order to talk to a doctor online for medical help, apart from registering yourself at the healthcare portals and fixing a time that is convenient for the doctor to get in touch with you, you are required to provide your contact number and Skype/VOIP caller ID. You can also receive medical information and your health evaluation (health calculators) report free of charge on these health portals. It is important that when you ask for medical advice online, you verify the credentials of the physician. Your health insurance company may be of good help to you in verifying the qualifications of the physician and check whether the doctor is board certified or registered with the state licensing board.
Tele-medicine
Recently insurance companies have come up with an ingenious method of providing live medical advice online to their clients as a measure of cost cutting. This model of online medical help is called Tele-medicine. In this model a patient can talk to a doctor online and obtain live doctor’s advice from a panel of physicians contracted by the insurance companies. The process goes like this- when you make a call to your insurance company in health matters the call is diverted to a contracted healthcare provider who reviews the information provided by you and from your medical history and makes an online medical diagnosis as well as provides treatment options over the phone.
Broadly speaking there are four categories of health portals available on the internet. These are,
- Portal for Online live doctor’s advice such as ‘Healthcaremagic.com;
- For maintaining digital health records such as ‘Yoscare.in’;
- Disease management website like ‘Wellinformed.in;
- Nutrition and fitness portal like ‘NutritionVista.com
Let us now have a look at some of the online healthcare portals available over the Net where online medical help is available at reasonable charges.
Talk to a doctor online through Healthcare portals
If you are in two minds over whether to go to consult a doctor nearest to your location by taking a break from your busy schedule, simply log in to talk to a doctor online for free. Some of the health care portals which provide such online medical diagnosis services by qualified doctors free or at reasonable charges are,
i. PinkWhaleHealthcare.com
ii. WebHealthCentre.com
iii. MedIndia.net
You can get online medical diagnosis services from the above portals after you key-in your ailment symptoms. However, these websites provide only ‘second opinions’ of the physicians on your disease symptoms which are not meant for substituting physical consultations. They also do not provide any prescription based on their medical observations.
Upload Medical History Online
If your health records and medical history are stored online in digital form, it would be easier for you to access the records of your medical history any time from any place. It would also save you from unnecessary expenditure on duplicate lab tests in case a report is misplaced. There are several websites like, Yostechnologies.com, MyHealthRecords.in and Ayogyadarpan.com which allow you to upload your scanned medical records in their sites. ‘MyHealthRecords.in’ has facilities where you can have a secure online account to manage and access your medical history throughout your lifetime. There are various subscription plans including a free plan for providing such online healthcare services. The paid premium plans offer family account for up to six relatives and additional services like alert messages for doctors' appointments, administering medicines and online medical advice through video conference.
Diagnostic Tests Online
The online healthcare portals are now bringing professional diagnostic solutions to your doorstep. Unlike visiting and consulting a doctor, for availing this service you are not to visit a laboratory physically. Health service providers will offer their customers access to all their labs in a particular city by collecting samples from their homes or offices and transporting them to the labs against a small fee.
For availing this medical diagnosis service online you are required to register on the health portal and choose the type of investigative test that you want. The portal will show a list of all the testing labs in a particular city along with the charges for different diagnostic tests. Once you select the lab of your choice, an agent of the service provider will collect samples from your designated place according to your convenience. Payment for the tests can be made online through a credit card or in cash during home visit of the sample collector. The lab test reports will be delivered to you online to your account as well e-mailed to you.
Conclusion
It is advisable that one should talk to a doctor online for medical advice as a guidance only and not as an alternative to physical consultation with a qualified doctor. However, when you go to consult a doctor, he may be too busy to answer all your queries or you may miss to ask him an important question. The healthcare portals provide online medical help to the patients where the patients can talk to a doctor online for free or at nominal charges so as to make them well-informed about health and wellness which may eventually work as a guide to improve his own and family’s quality of life. There are also many doctors who are happy to refer their patients to the healthcare portals for medical symptom diagnosis online to gain more knowledge on specific cases.