How invisible medical groups are powering telehealth’s GLP-1 ‘gold rush’

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By Katie Palmer

Oct. 17, 2024

Health Tech Correspondent

In the last two years, telehealth has gone all in on GLP-1s. Dozens of companies have started to offer the wildly popular obesity and diabetes medications, meeting patients who are flooding online for prescriptions that could help them lose as much as 20% of their body weight.

The telehealth GLP-1 boom wouldn’t be possible without clinicians willing to write prescriptions for those hundreds of thousands of patients. Companies are rarely transparent — with patients or the public — about the medical groups behind the screens. But a STAT examination found that just a handful of networks of doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants are writing prescriptions for dozens of websites offering the weight loss drugs, including the compounded versions that have been the subject of conflict and debate among clinicians and industry members.

Telehealth companies have been able to get off the ground in a matter of days by “renting” the services of these medical groups, which have established themselves as an invisible but critical piece of the puzzle enabling the digital cash grab surrounding GLP-1s. That online “gold rush,” clinicians and digital health experts have warned, could put patients at risk by reducing the provision of care to the mere sale of a drug.

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Katie Palmer
Health Tech Correspondent
Katie Palmer covers telehealth, clinical artificial intelligence, and the health data economy — with an emphasis on the impacts of digital health care for patients, providers, and businesses.