Yesterday there was nothing, and now your forearm is sore, bruised and swollen. You’d like to have a doctor take a look, but you have an important meeting coming up, and you can’t afford to miss work to drive across town and sit in an urgent care center waiting for a consultation. So you call SwiftMD.

In short order, an emergency-trained physician calls you back and asks a series of questions: Do you have a fever? Are there streaks around the bruise? When did you first notice the swelling? The physician suggests you take a picture of the bruise with a cell phone and email it.

Result: the doctor diagnoses an infected insect bite, calls in a prescription for antibiotics, and emails a list of symptoms to watch for, which might indicate the need for additional care. You attend your meeting, then grab the prescription on your way home from work. Simple as that.

You feel your son’s forehead. He’s burning up. You think you’ll have to take him to an emergency room.

Then you remember the SwiftMD membership that’s part of your group plan. Instead of getting dressed and racing across town in the middle of the night, you pick up the phone and request a consultation. You answer a few simple questions and are informed a physician will call shortly.

About 20 minutes later, the phone rings. The SwiftMD physician solves the problem—at a small fraction of the cost and with none of the inconvenience of a visit to the ER.

You felt fine when you boarded the plane this morning. Now, eight hours later and 2,000 miles away, you’re miserable. You have a fever and a productive cough, and you’re worried that you may have pneumonia.  You have a major presentation tomorrow. You think you’ve got the flu. But how serious is it? And who can you see at 9:00 p.m. so far from home?

You connect with SwiftMD on your laptop. About 15 minutes later you have an emergency-trained physician on the phone. The doctor determines that it may be bacterial pneumonia, but advises you that an x-ray and ER visit are not necessary.  He faxes the prescription you need to the pharmacy one block away.

The next day, instead of having been up all night in an ER, you have slept comfortably and you feel much better. Your presentation is flawless.

After an hour at your computer, you feel it coming on: a migraine. You’ve been getting these debilitating headaches for years and you know the only way to stop one is to take Imitrex. But you discover your bottle of medication is empty.

So you consult with a SwiftMD physician online, and immediately the prescription is called in to a pharmacy around the corner. You get fast relief.

You think, “If they’re not going to cover me, why do I have insurance anyway?” You sigh and try to get past the sticker shock. How can treatment for an ankle sprain be so expensive? You went to the urgent care, not the ER. You waited just like everyone else. You did what the doctor suggested and had an x-ray. And now you’re left with a $400 medical bill.

The problem isn’t with your ankle, it’s with the healthcare system. If you could put weight on your ankle and walk around a bit, there was less than a one percent chance of it being broken. In other words, you didn’t need the x-ray.

If you had called SwiftMD, we probably would have suggested you use rest, ice, compression and elevation on the ankle for 24 hours. In the vast majority of cases, your ankle would have improved and you’d have avoided the big medical bill. In fact, you’d have paid only $59 for the consultation. And you wouldn’t have had to wait in a doctor’s office, or even leave your home.