Dr. Natasha Bhuyan Introduces Amazon One Medical Pay-Per-Visit

0:02Hey, everyone, and welcome to What Freshel Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. Today, we're bringing you a very special interview with Dr. Natasha Bouillon, all about Amazon One Medical. Dr. Natasha Bouillon is a practicing family physician and national medical director at Amazon One Medical. She's responsible for driving clinical innovation, as well as growth, strategic partnerships, care model design, and quality primary care. We talked to Natasha about how Amazon One Medical is now offering trusted care through telehealth visits for kids ages 2 to 11 for things like pink eye, lice, and EpiPen prescription renewals.

0:42Yes, you heard it, even at night, even on the weekend, no waiting rooms, no hassle. It is such a great idea. So you're going to hear all about it in this interview, and you can find out more about Amazon One Medical Pay Per Visit at health.amazon.com slash children. And now our interview with Dr. Natasha Bouillon. We are so excited to be talking today to Dr. Natasha Bouillon, a physician with Amazon One Medical. Natasha, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your work with Amazon One Medical. Yes, well, thank you so much for having me. I am a family physician and I am our national medical director at One Medical.

1:23I support our clinical teams as well as I am a practicing doctor who still sees patients. But I mean, really, most importantly, I'm a mom to a delightful almost three-year-old. I'm also currently pregnant and baby boy is due next week. And so I definitely understand how parents are juggling a lot and just looking for convenience and affordability, not just when it comes to their kids' health, but really convenience and affordability for everything. But health is pretty critical to it. First of all, excellent job on spacing those kids. I believe in a three-year space as a person who had kids who were 18 months apart, three kids each 18 months apart.

1:59Love that middle guy. But I think maybe waiting until I had a three-year-old might have been a smart choice. And also, when you talk about moms and their concerns medically, tell us what the philosophy is behind Amazon One Medical and why this is particularly useful, as you know now, to moms. Yes. Well, we're really excited because Amazon One Medical pay-per-visit is now going to treat common kids' conditions. And so parents and guardians, they can expect really expert medical advice for concerns like pink eye, head lice, hand, foot, and mouth disease, all the gross ones. Yeah. Skin rashes, and it's for ages 2 to 11.

2:44But we know that when this comes up, it's so stressful for parents. And so we're just making sure that they have a convenient place to go that's also affordable, that they can get accurate medical advice and treatment. Tell us a little bit more about how it works. Yeah. So first of all, people can go to health.amazon.com backslash children. And what you do is you fill out this brief intake form with your child's medical history and their symptoms. And then Amazon One Medical Pay per visit will connect you with a board certified family practice physician like me or a licensed family nurse practitioner.

3:19And then a parent or a guardian, as well as the child, must be present during the consultation. And then, you know, the consultation happens and a provider will follow up after the consultation with a treatment plan. And that treatment plan might include prescription medications. That treatment plan might include advice or things that you can try over the counter or at home. And as you're about to find out with a three-year-old and a newborn, one of the big reasons this is helpful is that when you have a sick kid and having had three kids under four. The problem is not just getting one kid to the doctor.

3:54It's the other two kids. Let's all get in the car and go to a doctor's waiting room where at least one of us will probably pick up something else from someone and it will just cascade into a series of problems. So true. I mean, it's so interesting having two kids going to have two kids now. We were so sterile with our first child, like everything, like the pacifier fall out of her mouth and we would sterilize that you were so careful. And now with the second child, I'm like, I have the older sibling in daycare. If she gets pinkeye, I'm really worried that this will spread if she gets lice, it will spread.

4:29And so I think the idea of like, we know for parents, especially when you have multiple kids, these conditions spread like wildfire at a house. And you definitely want to make sure that you're getting the treatment for them. That's one of the reasons that this seems, I mean, we've been talking off mic before we started about why we think this is such a great idea and so useful for parents. But one of the reasons is this. So you think your kid has pink eye. It's a Saturday morning, right? Let's just say the options are spend the day at the ER, take the kid who probably has pink eye to soccer because you're not sure they do, but you're not sure they don't and have to spend the weekend spreading pink eye around your neighborhood or, you know, just wait until Monday and keep the kid home and hope everybody in the house doesn't get pink eye before them.

5:11But it all involves things that don't feel great. And this seems to me to be such a great option that can go alongside your more usual pediatric care maybe. But for this situation, this is such a clutch answer. Yes. And I think there's definitely specific conditions that we're focused on because we know these are the ones that are the most stressful and we can treat them virtually. So pink eye is one of them. Lice is another. Hand, foot and mouth disease is another. Fifth disease. Don't know if you've heard of that. It's the parvovirus. Slap face. Yes, the slap cheeks. And really any of those skin issues.

5:45Kids get rashes all the time. You know, parents look at that rash and they're like, is this a fungus? Is it eczema? Is that a bug bite? Is it poison ivy? So any sort of like skin condition or rash. And the other thing we also do is we'll refill things like EpiPens or asthma medication refills. And so it's like all of these things that people stress about. They don't want to wait. It's hard to get a hold of a specialist. It's these things that we can treat. And actually, I will tell you my own story is my daughter, she has an allergy to both peanuts and eggs. So she has an allergist. And the other day, my husband and I were looking at her EpiPens and we pulled it out.

6:23It's expired. And we kind of feel like, okay, parent of the year award, but it's hard to just keep up and check the EpiPen and what is expired. So we're like, okay, we need new EpiPens. Her allergist is wonderful, but I think we all know specialists are hard to get ahold of. It's hard to call them and there's a phone tree and sometimes you don't hear back. And so this is a perfect scenario. You know, we're members of One Medical, so we were able to get that renewed really quickly. But for people who can't get a hold of their specialist, can't get a hold of their pediatrician, they can use Amazon One Medical pay per visit and get those renewals done just really quickly virtually.

6:58We talk a lot on the podcast about mom worsts. We just did an episode where we were like, all right, is it lice or is it pink eye? Which is the worst? And this seems to be a solution. You're going to put us out of business as podcasters because it's the solution to a lot of the mom works. But one of the ones that I was thinking of was Pink Eye. We have a family reunion every year at the holidays where, you know, 20 of us now get together. It's just the nuclear family, spouses and children. And I think it was me. It might have been my sister. One of us showed up with a kid and immediately the older mom was like, that kid has Pink Eye.

7:32and we're suddenly patient zero on a beautiful vacation that everyone has spent a lot of money to go on and we have brought pink eye child with us and so then you spend an entire day of vacation at the urgent care again who knows what you're picking up at the urgent care to now bring home to the vacation but that is an example where i think if we could have just said don't worry about it we're about to get on this call the prescription will be waiting at the pharmacy down the street and we haven't actually ruined the vacation and you can stop giving us mean looks. That would have saved a lot of trouble.

8:07It would save so much trouble. And I will tell you, the other cherry on top here is that we can also collaborate with Amazon Pharmacy and have prescriptions delivered right to your door. And so that's another convenient factor of like, if people use Amazon One Medical Pay Per Visit and they need a prescription and they're out and about somewhere and they just need it delivered straight to them, they don't even have to go to the pharmacy. They could just have that delivered straight to their door, which people find really convenient. Yeah, I don't know what we're going to podcast about anymore.

8:33Amy is solving way too many of our problems. It is such a truism of mom life that the kid only gets sick when the pediatrician is closed. They only get a stomach bug in the wee hours of Saturday morning when you have to wait until Monday to get them seen. And have you seen that in your experience that these things seem to come up at only the most inconvenient times? Yeah, and we have to be very, very well aware that illnesses don't just happen Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Most of them are happening overnight. I think with pink eye, kids often wake up at six in the morning on a Saturday with pink eye.

9:09These rashes, you know, they pop up on weekends, they pop up on evenings. And it's tough because you don't want to have to go to an urgent care that might be expensive, that exposes you to other viruses. and also it's just really hard to sit with kids for hours on end in places like urgent cares and ERs and so just getting that virtual help is so useful even the other things that will help with is things like school notes it's like something so basic but it's hard to go through all these hoops to say like okay I need to get a note for school that my child had lice and it's treated and now they're doing well and so it's like just jumping through hoops to just get the most simplest things.

9:45We want to just make it easier for people. That is such a version of the child telling you that they need a fully built pirate ship tomorrow morning and it's been due for a month, but they forgot to tell you that thing of, oh, you need a written doctor's note before you can X, Y, Z. When you learn that at eight o 'clock at night, you're basically out of luck. You're like, all right, we're going to miss two more days of school until somebody can see us to write this note. Yeah, exactly. And I think having that access of just having convenient care in your pocket, just, you know, a website, an app away, it's so much more convenient for people.

10:21I think the hard part about being a parent is when the kid comes to you and says, like, mommy, my head itches at 2 a.m. because it's always at 2 a.m. is you don't know. You don't know whether you're supposed to send them back to bed or whether this is it's lice and action must be taken immediately. You just don't know. And so how does Amazon One Medical really help families make the right decision? Yeah. And this is the thing that's so true. There are so many symptoms that kids have where it's like, is this nothing? Will it resolve? Is this contagious and is everyone in the family going to get it?

10:57Or is this something more serious that we need to get immediate treatment from? And so this is where Amazon One Medical pay-per-visit can really help provide that quick guidance just to make sure people know what is the appropriate level of care. Are these concerning symptoms? I think the other big thing is it's advice that you can trust. I know so many parents who are sitting there on Google, you know, at two in the morning asking chat GPT about all these symptoms. It's not always tailored to their own child. And so making sure that you can get that evaluation quickly, someone can give you advice that you can trust, and then you'll know what is the treatment plan really immediately.

11:33So just that peace of mind is so important. You know that you're talking to a certified medical provider. You can run the condition by them. You can get advice that's trustworthy and it's timely. So that it does make a difference. And again, in some instances, people will get medications. In many instances, it's try this at home, you know, try this instead. Here's some advice. And that's sufficient for a lot of the parents and kids. It seems to me we're also talking about a lot of conditions where the earlier you treat them, like better to figure out it's lice before the other three kids and both parents end up with lice and we're boiling bedsheets for, you know, weeks on end, that it seems like this gives you a good opportunity to maybe get ahead.

12:19Having gotten hand, foot, and mouth disease from one of my children as a 40-something-year-old, I will say it was not one of my favorite life experiences. It was super gross and awful. And so it might have been good to recognize what was going on a little earlier. Absolutely. I think for some of these viruses, hand, foot, and mouth in particular, it's almost worse when adults get them. And so if my child had that, I would want to know because the symptoms are sometimes worse than adults. I think we know pink eye is very contagious. Lice is very contagious. And those skin rashes, it's so tough because those skin rashes, you don't know if there's something that is going to spread to other people.

12:57You don't know if it's going to get worse. You don't know if it's just something simple. And the treatment for all of them, like the cream you use for a fungus is different than the cream that you'd use for eczema. You don't want to mismatch that too. And so I think making sure you have the right diagnosis, something that's reliable and you know the treatment plan forward, it does help to intervene early. And you're saying you think it's a better plan to talk to a doctor than just to be like, here's some cream we used on your brother three years ago. We're just going to put it on you. Is that your position as a physician?

13:28Yeah. You don't want to just be sitting here putting steroid creams on fungal rashes when they need antifungals because that is not going to be helpful. And so I think there's just a lot of things that people aren't sure what to do. And we want to make it convenient for people. And look, I know a lot of people, ultimately, they'll delay care because it's not convenient or because it's expensive. And so they're like, OK, let me just watch and wait. Let me just see. And that's one of those territories where that's when things can get worse. So we don't want people delaying care. I wanted to underline something else that is amazing about this new service, which is that you don't need insurance to take part.

14:06So it's an option for families who are underinsured, uninsured, between insurers or fully insured and just really need to know if this is pink eye right now. So tell us how that works. Yes. So it's no insurance or membership is required to access the Amazon One Medical Pay Per Visit. And the messaging visits start at$29 and the video visits cost$49. So that is affordable for many people. And really, the pay-per-visit service, it's ideal for families that either don't have insurance or they don't want to use their insurance for occasional health needs. You know, they might have a high deductible health plan.

14:42And it's also truly, like I was saying before, it's an opportunity for families that might be putting off their care or delaying their care. And so it does help increase access. Now, I do want to contrast that, though. For some people who do have insurance, the one medical pay-per-visit option, it's there 24-7. And it isn't meant to replace a family's relationship with the pediatrician. So if they have a pediatrician, if they have a family doctor, they should still continue to see their pediatrician and family doctor for things like ear infections or long-term asthma management, obviously wellness visits and vaccines.

15:18Amazon pay-per-visit, it's intended to just be a convenient option for kind of those in-between moments. If you've got time-sensitive concerns, you don't want to use insurance, you know, there's these conditions that don't require an on-site evaluation. So trying to just really distinguish, like, when do I go to my pediatrician and when can I use a service like Amazon One Medical Pay Per Visit? And you can help people make that distinction, correct? Like, as they reach out to you, you might say to someone, you need to see an in-person provider for. and people, I think, have gotten used to that idea a little bit more as telehealth and online doctors have become a little bit more the norm.

15:58Absolutely. Yeah, we've definitely found that it's a good entry point for many people. It's an affordable entry point. And if they need to get escalated care, if they need to be seen in person, we will certainly let them know that. That's part of our guidance. I wanted to ask you, Natasha, about you really have emphasized mental health in your work as a physician, as a family physician. And we have been speaking a lot on this podcast recently about how being a parent really does seem more stressful than ever. Maybe it's the wealth of information, maybe it's the phones, who knows, but it does seem like a particularly stressful time to be a parent.

16:32So how do you as a physician and how do you through Amazon One Medical Support, not just the kids, but the parents who are concerned about them? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I spend more of my time talking to the parents and just providing guidance for them. I mean, you're right. People are really stressed right now. I think these mental health issues are kind of at an all time high. We're seeing more depression. We're seeing more anxiety. Obviously, our parents are going through a lot. And so for us, the Amazon paper visit, it is an option for parents that's time saving. It's stress saving and it's money saving.

17:06And so to be able to kind of skip an urgent care visit for a rash that can be treated safely, it's such a good option for people. It's just it's one less thing on their worry list. It's one less thing on their to do list. And, you know, like I'm saying, some of the conditions might need medication treatment. Some conditions need guidance you can trust. And some conditions are next steps that you can do at home. Amazon One Medical are primary care offerings for people who are looking for primary care and live nearby a One Medical office. that is a good option for parents too. Tell us a little bit more about that, the Amazon One Medical in-person services.

17:41Yeah, so the Amazon One Medical primary care in-person services, essentially we offer wraparound primary care. We do in-person care. We also do virtual visits. And so for people who have a One Medical membership, they are able to access our offices. We have 150 offices in over 20 cities across the US. And we do establish these ongoing primary care relationships with both the parents and the children. And it is hybrid. So people can come into an office or they can do a remote visit. It's billed to insurance. And so the One Medical Membership is actually a good option for people who want to use their insurance.

18:20The other nice thing about the One Medical membership is that people can access on-demand 24-7 video chats as well as message their provider, and they can do a lot more. All of that's covered for a$99 per year or$9 per month fee for Prime members. And so you could also go to onemedical.com for the$1.99 offering if you're not a Prime member, but it's a great discount for Prime members. And so that additional membership covers the 24-7 on-demand virtual care services. And that's urgent video chats, message-based consultations, managing common health concerns, obviously like prescription management.

19:00All those virtual services come with no additional co-pay or additional fees. And so I like to tell people, if you want to use your insurance and you live nearby a One Medical office, then the One Medical Primary Care membership is a great option for you. If you don't want to use your insurance and you just want convenient care that's on demand, Amazon Pay Per Visit is a good option for you. And tell us a little bit about how the Pay Per Visit consultations work. How long does it take to schedule one? How do you access the service? So one of the things is who is actually providing the care. It is you'd be connected to board certified family physicians or licensed family nurse practitioners.

19:42Those are the practitioners that are providing the care. In terms of wait times, video visits typically start within 30 minutes and you'll typically get a treatment plan five minutes after the video call. So it's very quick. It's not hours waiting. And then the messaging visits typically start within 20 minutes. They're really quick. And you'll get a treatment plan within an hour. And then with all of these, if people need a doctor's note or anything additional, we are able to write excuse notes for school, back to school notes, no play notes for sports, all kinds of things. It's such a quick response.

20:14I mean, the portals that all of my kids, many medical providers have, the portals are great, but sometimes they feel like the land of time forgot. A portal to nowhere. A portal to nowhere. Right. So 20 minutes to an hour. What? That sounds amazing. You spoke about if you have a One Medical office near you, how would people find out if they have an office near them? So health.amazon.com has information. People can also go to onemedical.com to see the cities and offices that we're located at. We are going to put a link in the show notes to this episode to health.amazon.com slash children, where you can find out more about this new service.

20:54and Dr. Bouillon, I can't believe you're having a baby next week. And you took the time to talk to us. The whole audience is sending you the best of vibes. And many of us are thinking better her than me, but we still wish you all the best. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. It's funny. A lot of people have told me having two, they're like, it's not like you just double the children. It's like you quintuple the number of kids you have when you go from one to two. I will see how that plays out. I'm a big believer. Zero to one, it'll never get harder than that because you're already doing it.

21:29You know, you're already making chicken nuggets. You're just throwing a couple more on. It's not that you actually double the work. You're already doing a lot of it. I'm going to take the other side of that, but then I usually do. We almost never agree. I'm going to say one to two is like one squared. It's all of a sudden. Yeah, it's it's interesting. But you got this. I'll report back and let you know how it goes. We believe in you. Thank you, Dr. Natasha Buryon. Find out more at health.amazon.com slash children. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Thank you.