Telehealth abuse may go beyond MaNaDr clinic; more can be done to weed out errant doctors

AN UNCOMFORTABLE spotlight has been cast on Singapore’s telehealth providers – and all the bad apples may not have been caught yet.

On Aug 16, it emerged that teleconsultation services provided by MaNaDr Clinic “are likely to have involved clinically and ethically inappropriate practices”. Announcing these preliminary findings, the Ministry of Health (MOH) ordered MaNaDr to stop providing teleconsultations “until further notice”.

Among other things, in one sampled month, more than 100,000 of MaNaDr’s teleconsultations involved video calls of one minute or less. These “very short consultations” often resulted in the patient getting a medical certificate (MC) – with some patients getting several this way – within a short period of time.