How large companies launch telehealth without building a medical practice

Build, partner or run on licensed infrastructure?

If you want to own the customer without running a medical group, run your own care experience on licensed clinical infrastructure. You keep the brand, pricing, patients and revenue, pay per completed visit, and can be live in as little as three weeks. Building a practice takes quarters and adds fixed cost; a storefront partner is fast but keeps your customer.

Don’t anchor on the engineering estimate. It arrives first because software is what the room knows how to scope. Compare the paths on what you own at the end and what stays on your books.

Building means forming a medical group

In many states a company can’t own a practice directly. Corporate practice of medicine rules bar a lay corporation from employing physicians or controlling clinical decisions. The standard fix is a clinician-owned professional corporation plus a management services organization you own, joined by a services agreement. Structuring that properly is specialist legal work, and the rules differ by state.

Then you still need:

• Licensed providers in every state you sell into, with renewals and collaboration rules that vary by state.
• A medical director to own protocols, quality, adverse events and regulators.
• Malpractice cover for every clinician, plus cyber cover for the health data you hold.
• E-prescribing, plus DEA telemedicine controls if you touch controlled substances.
• Pharmacy contracts in every state, and the routing and exception handling around them.
• State modality and consent rules, a HIPAA program, advertising review and, in many categories, LegitScript certification.

All of it is a standing organization that costs the same at 200 patients a month or 20,000. Our cost to launch telehealth breakdown prices the line items. What a vendor stack costs per visit shows how the invoices add up once you’re live.

A storefront partner keeps the customer

A storefront partner runs the whole patient-facing service; you send a link or a co-branded page. For a demand test with no product work, that can be a sensible first step.

What you hand over is the customer. The experience, emails and packaging carry the partner’s name. The record and purchase history sit in its systems, and you get aggregate reports. The partner sets the price, which makes bundling care into a membership hard. If the deal ends, the patients usually stay.

Read the payment terms closely. A referral fee that rises with patients or prescriptions draws scrutiny under anti-kickback and fee-splitting laws; see our anti-kickback guide for telehealth marketing.

Licensed infrastructure: you own the experience, providers own the decision

Licensed clinical infrastructure is a licensed medical layer (providers, protocols, prescribing, pharmacy routing and state-by-state compliance) that a company calls through an API underneath its own branded care experience. Patients pay you through your own merchant account. Licensed providers make every clinical decision under their own licenses.

You still do real work: intake design, which treatments to offer, pricing, copy and the web or app flow. What you skip is forming, licensing and staffing a medical group.

Two questions settle the choice

Would a partner’s name on your customers’ prescription bottles bother you? If yes, rule out the storefront. Will you recruit a medical director and staff fifty-state compliance for years? If not, rule out the build.

Build only when care will be your core business for the long term. Use a partner for a time-boxed demand test. Everyone else who wants the customer relationship lands on infrastructure.

Your internal reviews set the timeline

On licensed infrastructure the fastest case takes three weeks:

1. Week 1: sandbox access, BAA and MSA, modality and product shape.
2. Week 2: protocols and compliance review.
3. Week 3: technical review and launch.

Pace varies, and Lithos commits to a firm launch date on the first call. Large companies rarely move that fast, and the clinical layer isn’t why. Security assessment, legal review of marketing claims and procurement each run on their own clock. They stop being the bottleneck only if they start on day one.

Bring six functions in during the first two weeks

The tracking pixel catches most retail teams; HIPAA and marketing analytics explains why. Hand procurement and security the telehealth infrastructure RFP checklist.

Decide five things in month one

1. Category. Pick one where demand already shows: renewals for a pharmacy, weight care for a fitness brand, hair and skin for a personal-care brand.
2. Path. Use the two questions above.
3. States and channel. A few states and one entry point keep the launch reviewable.
4. Owner. One leader with authority across product, legal and operations.
5. Success metrics. Completed visits, prescription rate, renewal share, support contacts per visit and satisfaction, with targets written down now. Numbers chosen after the fact won’t survive the first budget review.

Frequently asked questions