Hims launched in 2017 with a simple observation: men were not getting treatment for conditions they had because going to a doctor felt inconvenient, embarrassing, or both. The solution was not a clinical innovation. It was a delivery model. By putting the prescription process online, removing the waiting room, and wrapping the whole thing in branding that felt like a consumer product rather than a medical visit, Hims built a business worth several billion dollars on a patient population that healthcare had largely written off as unreachable.
That was the proof of concept for men's telehealth. What Hims proved is that men will engage with healthcare when the barrier to entry is low enough, and the experience is private enough. It also proved that the men's health market is large, underserved, and highly responsive to a well-executed virtual care model.
At Bask Health, we provide the infrastructure that powers this kind of business, and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) defines telehealth as the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to support long-distance clinical health care, exactly the model Hims built and that the next generation of men's health brands is building on today. This article covers what the men's telehealth market looks like, why it works, and what a brand needs to build in it successfully, including how Bask Health's virtual clinic infrastructure makes it possible to launch without a custom build.
Key Takeaways
- Men are significantly less likely than women to seek medical care. According to the CDC, women are 33% more likely than men to visit the doctor annually, and 100% more likely to seek preventive care.
- The men's telehealth market is validated and growing, with major brands demonstrating that a well-executed virtual care model drives consistent patient engagement in demographics that historically avoided healthcare.
- According to Telehealth.HHS.gov, men's telehealth can address sexual health, behavioral health, chronic disease management, and preventive care through virtual visits that offer privacy, convenience, and flexibility.
- The conditions that drive the most volume in men's telehealth, including erectile dysfunction, hair loss, testosterone management, and mental health, are well-suited to asynchronous intake and ongoing subscription models.
- Building a men's telehealth brand requires condition-specific intake, connected e-prescribing, ongoing patient follow-up, and pharmacy fulfillment infrastructure.
- Bask Health provides the full infrastructure stack for men's telehealth brands, from intake to delivered prescription, in one connected platform.
Why Men's Telehealth Works When In-Person Care Does Not
The CDC data on men and healthcare-seeking behavior is striking. Women are 33% more likely than men to visit the doctor each year. The Cleveland Clinic found that 65% of men avoid going to the doctor as long as possible. These are not minor statistical variations. They represent a massive population of patients who have opted out of the traditional healthcare system not because they do not have health concerns, but because the system was not designed around how they actually make decisions.
Men avoid in-person care for reasons that are well-documented and consistent: inconvenience, stigma around vulnerability and sensitive health topics, the practical barrier of taking time off work for a non-urgent appointment, and embarrassment about conditions they consider personal. Every one of those barriers is significantly reduced or eliminated by a well-designed telehealth model.
A patient can complete an intake form about erectile dysfunction from his phone during a lunch break without sitting in a waiting room, without making eye contact with a receptionist, and without anyone in his community knowing he sought care. That privacy and convenience is not a feature of men's telehealth. It is the primary mechanism by which men's telehealth reaches patients that in-person care never could.
According to Telehealth.HHS.gov's dedicated men's health resource, telehealth reduces stigma and fear of judgment for sensitive issues, including sexual and mental health, offers convenience without travel or waiting rooms, and provides scheduling flexibility that makes it easier for working patients to prioritize their health. That is a direct description of why the Hims model worked, and why it continues to work for the brands that have built in this space since.
The Conditions That Drive Men's Telehealth Volume
Men's telehealth is not a single clinical category. It spans a range of conditions that share two characteristics: they are common among men, and they are conditions men are particularly reluctant to discuss in a traditional clinical setting.
Sexual Health
Erectile dysfunction affects an estimated 30 million men in the United States and is significantly underdiagnosed and undertreated, largely because of the stigma associated with discussing it with a doctor. Telehealth removes that barrier almost entirely. A patient can complete a structured intake form, have a provider review his health history and eligibility, and receive a prescription for sildenafil or tadalafil without a face-to-face encounter. The same model applies to premature ejaculation treatment and sexually transmitted infection screening and follow-up.
Hair Loss
Male pattern hair loss affects roughly half of all men by age 50. It is not a condition that requires in-person examination for most treatment decisions. A provider reviewing a patient's description of hair loss pattern, duration, and health history can appropriately prescribe finasteride or minoxidil through an asynchronous intake review. Hair loss was one of the earliest and most successful men's telehealth categories, and it remains a high-volume, high-retention segment because patients who respond to treatment tend to stay on it long-term.
Testosterone and Men's Health
Low testosterone is common and significantly underdiagnosed. Symptoms including fatigue, reduced libido, muscle loss, and mood changes are frequently attributed to aging rather than investigated clinically. Telehealth makes it practical for men to have their testosterone levels evaluated and to follow up on treatment without the friction of repeated in-person visits.
Mental and Behavioral Health
Men's mental health is one of the most significant unmet needs in American healthcare. According to Telehealth.HHS.gov's behavioral health guidance, telehealth use for behavioral health remains high, with 80% of mental health treatment facilities now offering care via telehealth, and the evidence indicates that telehealth increases access, continuity of care, and privacy while reducing barriers including stigma. For men specifically, the privacy of a telehealth visit makes it significantly more likely they will engage with mental health care at all.
Weight Management
Weight management is increasingly a men's telehealth category as GLP-1 medications have demonstrated strong clinical results. A male patient with a BMI qualifying him for GLP-1 treatment can complete an eligibility intake, receive a prescription, and begin treatment without a single in-person visit. This category overlaps significantly with men's health platforms that already serve patients for other conditions, making it a natural expansion for existing men's telehealth brands.
What Hims Built and What It Means for New Entrants
Hims built its initial success on a narrow focus (ED and hair loss), a consumer-quality brand experience, and a subscription model that converted one-time patients into long-term customers. The infrastructure underneath- HIPAA-compliant intake, asynchronous provider review, connected e-prescribing, and pharmacy fulfillment- was what made the model operationally viable at scale.
What Hims proved for the market is that men will pay for healthcare access when the product is designed around their actual behavior rather than the convenience of the clinical system. What it proved for entrepreneurs is that the infrastructure required to run this kind of business is not proprietary. It is available to any brand that makes the right platform decision early.
The men's telehealth market is also considerably less winner-take-all than the brand dominance of Hims and Roman might suggest. Both platforms serve a general men's health audience. There is significant room for brands that serve specific conditions more deeply, specific demographics more intentionally, or specific geographies with better provider availability and local credibility.
Direct Answer: What Conditions Does Men's Telehealth Cover?
Men's telehealth covers erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, hair loss, testosterone management, weight management including GLP-1 prescribing, mental health including depression and anxiety, chronic disease management including hypertension and diabetes, and preventive care including STI screening and lifestyle counseling. Most of these conditions are well-suited to asynchronous intake models where a patient submits health information and a provider reviews and responds without a live appointment.
What a Men's Telehealth Brand Needs to Build
The clinical categories that drive men's telehealth volume share an infrastructure profile: they require condition-specific intake, asynchronous provider review, connected e-prescribing, and pharmacy fulfillment. Here is what each component needs to deliver.
Intake Designed Around Sensitivity and Specificity
A patient completing an intake form about erectile dysfunction or hair loss is already navigating some degree of discomfort. The intake experience needs to be fast, direct, and clearly designed for the condition rather than a generic health questionnaire that feels clinical and impersonal. Questions should be purposeful, the form should be mobile-optimized and completable in minutes, and the language should be matter-of-fact rather than clinical or euphemistic.
Bask Health's drag-and-drop questionnaire builder lets clinical teams design condition-specific intake flows for each men's health category without engineering work. An ED intake, a hair loss intake, and a testosterone intake each need different clinical questions, and the platform lets clinical staff configure and update each one independently as protocols evolve.
E-Prescribing Connected to the Clinical Review
Men's telehealth runs primarily on asynchronous care. A provider reviews an intake form and approves or declines treatment without a live visit. When treatment is approved, the prescription needs to route directly from the clinical review to the pharmacy without manual intervention. A workflow that requires the provider to log into a separate system to complete the prescription adds friction that compounds quickly at volume.
Bask Health's EMR and e-prescribing tools keep clinical documentation and prescribing in the same workflow, so the provider's approval and the prescription are part of the same clinical record rather than two separate steps in two separate systems.
Patient Management for Ongoing Care
Men's telehealth is predominantly a subscription business. Patients who respond to treatment stay on it, which means the ongoing relationship matters as much as the initial conversion. Clinical teams need visibility into which patients are due for follow-up, which patients have not refilled a prescription that should be ongoing, and which patients have reported side effects that require clinical attention.
Bask Health's patient management tools give clinical teams real-time visibility across their full patient population, so ongoing care does not require manual tracking and patients do not fall through the cracks between their initial visit and their next refill.
Pharmacy Fulfillment That Closes the Loop
For DTC men's health brands that ship medication directly to patients, pharmacy fulfillment is as important as the clinical side of the product. A patient who gets a prescription approved and then receives no communication about when his medication will arrive has a broken experience regardless of how well the clinical review went.
Bask Health's pharmacy fulfillment and order management tools connect the clinical prescription to fulfillment and delivery, with order tracking and patient communication running on the same platform as the intake and clinical review rather than being managed as a separate logistics operation.
HIPAA Compliance Across Sensitive Data
Men's health data is particularly sensitive. Sexual health history, mental health information, and medication records require HIPAA-compliant handling at every touchpoint. The compliance architecture needs to cover intake, clinical documentation, messaging, and pharmacy coordination, not just the video layer that most platforms focus on.
Bask Health's HIPAA-compliant security infrastructure covers the full data journey, with encryption, access controls, and BAA coverage across the platform rather than at the individual feature level.
A Note From the Field
The men's telehealth brands that build durable businesses are not the ones that competed directly with Hims on price. They are the ones that found a specific patient population within the broader men's health market, served it with a clinical model and brand experience tailored to that population, and built retention into the product from the first prescription. The infrastructure underneath matters less to the patient than the brand experience on top, but it determines whether the brand experience can be delivered consistently at scale. Getting that layer right early is what separates the brands that grow from the ones that get stuck at a few hundred patients.
Conclusion
Hims proved that men will engage with healthcare when the experience is private, convenient, and designed around how they actually make decisions. What it left open is a large market of specific conditions, specific demographics, and specific geographies that a general men's health platform will never serve as well as a focused brand built specifically for them.
The infrastructure to build a men's telehealth brand is available today. Condition-specific intake, connected e-prescribing, patient management for ongoing care, and pharmacy fulfillment can all run on a single platform rather than requiring a custom build or a patchwork of disconnected tools. Bask Health provides that infrastructure, so men's health brands can focus on the clinical model, the brand experience, and the patient relationships that actually differentiate them in the market.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or medical advice.
References
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office for the Advancement of Telehealth. (n.d.). Telehealth for behavioral health: Best practice guide. https://telehealth.hhs.gov/providers/best-practice-guides/telehealth-for-behavioral-health
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office for the Advancement of Telehealth. (n.d.). Getting started using telehealth for men's health. https://telehealth.hhs.gov/providers/best-practice-guides/telehealth-mens-health/getting-started-using-telehealth-mens-health
- Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). (n.d.). What is telehealth? https://www.hrsa.gov/telehealth/what-is-telehealth
