Telehealth Giant Drew People With Addiction. Deaths, Overdoses Followed

PPP board member, Dr. Alyson Maloy, is featured in a Bloomberg story discussing how telehealth startup, Cerebral, was ill-equipped to treat those who didn’t disclose substance-use disorders. Dr. Maloy’s insights include sharing, “while we appreciate efforts including regular audits of clinical guidelines, dedicated crisis response teams, and internal care coordination, we note that these aspects of care are routinely provided by psychiatrists and mental health clinics across the country.”

The article features Dr. Maloy’s comments on how the “bigger issue is that patients can suffer from high-volume corporate medicine if adequate safeguards aren’t in place.” Furthermore, the article quotes Dr. Maloy noting, “when corporations come in and they try to squeeze the practice of medicine into this corporate model of productivity and maximizing profit, there are many situations in which it doesn’t work…And those tension points are where people get hurt.”