Your Family Doctor & TeleTest#

No. TeleTest provides episodic care - one consultation per visit, similar to a walk-in clinic or virtual urgent care. We don't take patients on as a roster and we don't form an ongoing primary-care relationship after a visit.

You can use TeleTest as often as you'd like for the specific concerns we treat, but we're not a replacement for a family doctor when it comes to comprehensive primary care, in-person physical exams, annual check-ups, complex chronic-disease management, or pediatric care.

Yes - we recommend it. A family doctor (or nurse practitioner) is the right place for:

• In-person physical exams and annual check-ups.
• Long-term management of chronic conditions that need an ongoing patient relationship.
• Pediatric care, prenatal care, and complex care coordination.
• Referrals to specialists (cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, etc.).
• Mental-health care with continuity.

If you don't have a family doctor, the provincial Health Care Connect program (Ontario) or Health Connect Registry (BC) can help you get matched with one.

It's entirely your choice. Patients use TeleTest for different reasons:

• Some patients prefer their family doctor know about every visit so the care is integrated. If that's your preference, download a PDF copy of your results and bring or send them to your family doctor.
• Other patients value the privacy TeleTest offers (especially for sexual-health, hormone-related, or other sensitive concerns) and prefer to keep TeleTest visits separate from their family doctor's chart.

Both are valid. TeleTest doesn't share information with your family doctor unless you explicitly ask us to.

No. TeleTest never bills your provincial health plan for our consultation, so your family doctor's roster, capitation, or enrolment income is not affected by your visit with us.

Context - Ontario (the penalty most patients have heard about):

Most Ontario family doctors are enrolled in capitation-based models (Family Health Organization / FHO, Family Health Network / FHN, or Family Health Group / FHG). Under these models, the family doctor receives a fixed monthly payment per rostered patient from OHIP - regardless of whether you visit them in that month. This is called capitation income.

When a rostered patient sees an outside OHIP-billing primary-care provider (walk-in clinic, after-hours clinic, virtual primary-care provider that bills OHIP), the family doctor's capitation can be reduced through two mechanisms:

• Negation: the family doctor's monthly capitation payment for that patient is reduced for the month the outside visit happened. Effectively, the rostered family doctor pays the walk-in clinic physician out of their own capitation income for that visit.
• Access Bonus reduction: FHO/FHN family doctors receive an annual bonus on top of capitation, conditional on keeping patients "in network." Outside OHIP-billing primary-care visits reduce this bonus over the year.

That's why many Ontario family doctors discourage walk-in or after-hours clinic visits by their rostered patients.

TeleTest does not trigger either mechanism because:

• We are a private-pay service - you pay TeleTest directly for the consultation.
• We do not bill OHIP for any patient-care service.
• The negation and access-bonus rules only apply to outside services that bill OHIP.

The same is true for specialist visits (no negation for specialists), hospital-based care that isn't primary care, and other private-pay services.

Context - BC and other provinces:

BC family doctors are generally paid through fee-for-service or under the BC Longitudinal Family Physician (LFP) model. The Ontario-style capitation-negation structure doesn't apply in BC in the same way, but the bottom-line answer is the same: TeleTest doesn't bill the provincial health plan, so there's no impact on your family-doctor relationship in any province.

If you're part of a Family Health Team (Ontario), Primary Care Network (BC), or rostered to a physician anywhere in Canada, you can use TeleTest without worrying about your doctor being affected financially.

No. Using your health card at the lab means the lab bills the provincial plan for the lab tests (not for any clinician visit). Your family doctor isn't penalized because no virtual-consultation claim was submitted to the provincial plan.

You pay TeleTest for the consultation. Lab fees are typically covered under your provincial health plan when ordered with a medical indication; uninsured tests you'd pay the lab directly for.

If you'd prefer your lab results not be linked to your provincial health card, see Anonymous Testing & Privacy for the semi-anonymous testing flow.

No. TeleTest does not notify your family doctor about your consultation, and we don't send your results to them automatically. We don't collect your family doctor's name or contact information at all.

The only way your family doctor would learn about your testing on their own is if:

1. They specifically search the provincial laboratory database (OLIS in Ontario, equivalent in BC) for your name + date of birth - the result would be findable there.
2. A lab technician inadvertently CC'd them on the requisition at the time of collection (this is a separate issue - see the lab-visit gotchas below).
3. A mandatory public-health report is generated for a reportable positive STI result. These go to the public health unit, not directly to your family doctor.

No - not without your explicit written consent. Your TeleTest consultations (secure messages, real-time chat transcripts, intake history, treatment notes) are stored in your TeleTest portal and our medical record system, and are not shared with any external provider unless you sign a release.

If you want a specific consultation summary shared with your family doctor, use our contact form to request it.

The cleanest approach:

1. Download the PDF of your results from the patient portal.
2. Send the PDF to your family doctor by email, secure patient portal (many EMRs accept patient-uploaded PDFs), or print and bring it to your next appointment.

The PDF is the official document and is what insurers, family doctors, and other clinicians will accept. We don't auto-forward results to your family doctor's chart - that step is patient-driven.

No. TeleTest does not forward results to family doctors or other clinicians. If you want your family doctor to have a copy:

1. Download the PDF of your results from your patient portal.
2. Bring or send it to your family doctor yourself - email, secure patient portal, or printed copy at your next appointment.

This keeps you in control of which results are shared and avoids any chance of results landing somewhere you didn't intend.

That's up to you. You're under no obligation to disclose TeleTest visits to your family doctor, and your family doctor has no automatic access to that information. If you'd like to share, the easiest way is to bring or send a PDF copy of the relevant results.

If you'd rather not discuss it, you don't need to - the relationship is yours to manage.

Your family doctor has the full context of your history - in-person exams, longitudinal care, family history, mental-health context, medication history, and continuity of relationship - that a TeleTest clinician doesn't have access to during a single episodic visit.

If their recommendation differs from a TeleTest clinician's, follow your family doctor's plan. You can mention the disagreement at your next TeleTest visit - submit a new consultation through the platform and note it in the intake's additional-information section, and the reviewing clinician will see it. Don't continue both plans in parallel without one of the clinicians knowing - that can create unsafe interactions.

Two practical things to do at the lab visit. Both come up often:

• Ask the lab technician to confirm no CC is being added. Lab technicians sometimes, out of habit, CC your family doctor on the requisition at the time of collection. TeleTest's requisitions don't list a CC to any external provider (we don't even know who your family doctor is). If you want results to come only to TeleTest, ask the tech at check-in to confirm no external CC was added.
• Don't bundle requisitions from different clinicians at the same visit. If you bring a TeleTest requisition and a separate paper or electronic requisition from your family doctor on the same lab visit, the lab may merge the orders and send all results to only one clinician - often the non-TeleTest one. Use a separate lab visit for each requisition if you want them routed separately.

Not fully - results are still indexed by name + date of birth in the provincial laboratory database (OLIS in Ontario, equivalent in BC). However, you can un-link them from your provincial health card, which prevents the result from auto-flowing into your family doctor's EMR.

See the semi-anonymous testing flow for full details.

Either works - use whichever is easier for you. TeleTest renews a wide range of medications, including stable chronic-disease prescriptions you started elsewhere. Practical considerations:

• Family doctor advantages: their visit is covered by your provincial health plan (no out-of-pocket fee), and they have longitudinal context, in-person monitoring, and your full medical history.
• TeleTest advantages: no wait time for an appointment, available outside typical clinic hours, and the renewal happens by secure message - you can submit your intake from home and your prescription is faxed directly to your pharmacy.

What TeleTest can renew (when you've been on the medication elsewhere and your dose is stable):

• Stable chronic-disease prescriptions: blood pressure, cholesterol, gout, diabetes, thyroid.
• Patient-preference renewals: hormone replacement therapy, birth control, period delay, hair loss, erectile dysfunction.

For these, we'll review your prior prescription, recent bloodwork, and monitoring history before issuing the renewal.

What TeleTest cannot initiate (but may be able to renew): some chronic-disease categories require an initial in-person assessment. We won't start new prescriptions in those categories, but if your family doctor or another clinician started you on the medication, we can take over renewals.

For the full list of categories TeleTest renews, see Prescriptions.

Use your family doctor when you need:

• A physical exam or in-person assessment.
• Pediatric care or care for a family member who can't use the portal independently.
• Long-term management of complex chronic conditions.
• Specialist referrals (cardiology, dermatology biopsies, gastroenterology, gynaecology procedures, etc.).
• Tests we don't order (Lyme serology, cortisol, ANA, ESR, RF, CT calcium scan, colonoscopy, etc. - see Tests and Lab Requisitions).
• Urgent in-person symptoms (chest pain, abdominal pain, severe symptoms) - go to a walk-in clinic, urgent care, or emergency department.

Use TeleTest when you need a focused virtual consultation for one of the panels we offer, want flexible-hours access without an appointment, or value privacy for a sensitive concern.