Let's begin with introductions to my far left.

Stephen Libby, Council Research.

Mary Stefopoulos, Office of General Counsel.

Kim Taylor, Council Auditor.

Good morning, Roy Diamond, District 13, the beaches.

Ron Salem group two at large.

Good morning.

Raw areas, District 11.

Okay, why don't we we have copies of the telehealth report on its way down?

But I'll turn over to Councilmember Diamond, and I'm gonna make some comments as well.

And maybe uh Councilmember Arius as well, and uh we'll go forward from there.

Sounds good.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

All right, so we get to kind of land the plane today, which is exciting.

Took a little longer than I would have liked.

I prefer you know, maybe a couple of months, but this was uh a lot more fact intensive than we realized.

And so um the headline is that we have shown in documents and in just like plain common sense that we could have saved two million dollars had we not done the telescope health contract.

There's simply no other way of looking at it.

The telescope health uh was providing telehealth to those who might be interested in going to the ER when someone dials 911.

There is a free option, it's not just right site.

There are multiple free options that the city could have contracted with.

Uh, but the city does have a contract, a long-standing one now with right site.

The difference between telescope health and right side is that telescope health just build the city for more than two million dollars for this, whereas uh right site and other entities don't bill the municipality at all, they bill private insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid, and for an indigent person, they charge nothing, but it all kind of averages out.

So it begs the question why on earth would the city pay two million dollars if they could be getting it for free?

And it's my strong opinion that the headline of this is that we shouldn't, that we can get this service for free.

So in order to get there, you have to have JFRD actually utilizing the service, whether it's right side or another entity, we ought to be doing the free option.

There are half a dozen of these entities that I found across the country, so it doesn't have to be any particular one.

But whatever we're doing, it's important that uh we're trying to get the best bang for the taxpayer dollar.

One of the policy issues here is that the um push on this has been that we're going to save the city money.

And the truth of the matter is that we save the city zero dollars.

Taxpayers save zero dollars using telescope health.

The people who save money are the hospitals, which is fine for the hospitals, but it's not our job, I believe, as the city, to try and save hospitals money.

It's just it's like saying we ought to go out and start fixing people's Fords and Chevy so that we can save Ford and GM from having to live up on their warranty claims.

That doesn't make any sense.

The people who are doing the service are to be the who are in the business of doing it ought to be the one who are paying.

Um other findings from the report are that, and then this is just a fact from the math that um I'm gonna use the nicest language I can.

Telescope Health exaggerated their numbers.

First, they said the city was saving money, city is saving no dollars, not a dollar.

They also inflated how much we're saving as far as emergency room visits and all the rest.

And in the report, the math is all listed out there, and it's it's really undeniable.

We provided them a copy of the report so that they could respond.

Um, I don't think anyone is here from there today, uh, but they are we're more than welcome to do it.

We also I had multiple meetings with the folks at telescope on the phone and in person, and uh was able to get a lot of their feedback.

I think it's important to also note that there are uh other stuff that we looked at where we find when we have foundings that were positive for telescope health.

So if you're gonna say things publicly, I think it's important to get everything right and to be very public about it.

So one of the issues that was brought to me when we brought this up was that there was Medicare and Medicaid fraud going on.

And as we just started picking at this, it was clear that uh telescope health wasn't billing Medicare or Medicaid patients.

And so we just stopped that investigation and made no conclusion, either positive or negative negative about Medicare or Medicaid fraud.

I ensure that that language is in the report because I think you need to be fair and honest about it.

The other issue was whether or not there was illegal conflicts of interest going on.

And it and from a distance it looked bad because you had one person, Dr.

Thompson, wearing three hats and some city entities and then non-city entities.

Um and so it looked bad from a distance, but we did the due diligence on each of those pieces and found that he had filed the proper paperwork and had not violated any state statute.

So while it may look bad, he had followed the law.

And I think that if you're gonna do these things publicly, you have to you know do the the last part publicly too to say what you found and what you didn't find.

So we didn't find that he had violated any law or that anyone at telescope had.

Um but going back to the beginning, which is to say there's two million dollars that the city could save over four-year term.

That's eight million dollars that the city of Jacksonville can recoup from this.

And so I think this has been a great bang for the buck as far as investigations go.