Roughly one in four users of telemedicine platforms, which helped fill gaps in medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent standoff between the government and doctors, failed to receive prescribed specialty medications even after obtaining a prescription.
According to internal data from the telemedicine platform "My Doctor" obtained by The Seoul Economic Daily on Wednesday, the medication pickup rate among telemedicine users stood at just 73.28% between March 2024, when the government fully permitted a telemedicine pilot program to address the medical gap caused by the departure of trainee doctors, and March of this year. This is the first time such a figure has been disclosed in numerical form. The share of cases in which patients either took more than 12 hours to pick up their medication or failed to obtain it altogether after receiving telemedicine on holidays or during late-night hours was 36.5%, more than 10 percentage points higher than the 25.6% recorded during weekday daytime hours.
The average time required to pick up medication after a telemedicine consultation during holidays and late-night hours was 8.87 hours, more than three hours longer than the weekday daytime average of 5.76 hours. This is because medication delivery is not permitted even after a telemedicine consultation, forcing patients to pick up the drugs in person.
Experts warn that usage may decline further when the revised Medical Service Act takes effect in December. Regulations will be tightened compared with the pilot program, with first-visit telemedicine consultations allowed only at hospitals in the patient's area of residence and the number of telemedicine consultations at each hospital capped at a certain monthly share of total consultations. In recent discussions on subordinate legislation, proposals to restrict the types of drugs that can be prescribed via telemedicine and the number of days covered by such prescriptions — citing concerns over drug misuse — were also reportedly raised. "During the pilot program, many hospitals offered telemedicine around the clock, but after the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced plans to cap the share of telemedicine consultations, the proportion of hospitals offering consultations during early-morning hours has dropped significantly," said Sun Jae-won, CEO of My Doctor.
