Many insurers are adopting comprehensive telehealth coverage, setting the ball rolling for others to follow suit.
The latest to announce coverage for telehealth services is New Jersey's Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, which serves around 3.7 million residents in the state.
For 2015, the nonprofit Horizon BCBSNJ is unveiling a new service called Horizon CareOnline offering online video access to a physician 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The online consults are being made available at no cost to the company's individual plan members through American Well, one of the largest telehealth providers. Using laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones, members log in, and then can choose from doctors who are licensed in New Jersey.
"Horizon recognizes that there are times when individuals cannot get to a doctor quickly or easily when they get sick, so Horizon CareOnline will go a long way to adding convenience to receiving care from a licensed physician," said Christopher Lepre, Horizon BCBSNJ's senior vice president of market business units.
Horizon BCBSNJ's telehealth benefit will start out available only for individual plan members, "but we will be looking to expand its reach in the future," the company said.
Other telemedicine services, including Anthem Blue Cross subsidiary LiveHealth Online, use similar models of connecting patients with doctors via a service, not necessarily their own primary care physician.
Others, like Arches Health Plan in Utah, are offering telemedicine technology to doctors in their network, so that they connect with members they already have treated.
Another Blue Cross insurer on the other side of the country, Premera, is combining the two main telehealth models, giving members the option to have digital consults their primary care physician or childrens' pediatrician, or with a doctor they've never met online.
Whatever the model -- and despite lingering resistance from some medical groups, hospital associations and insurers -- telemedicine is bound to become a common feature of the American health system. Twenty states require commercial insurers to reimburse providers for telehealth, while 43 Medicaid programs have some form of coverage of the digital consultation service.