Telemedicine platform providers – featuring integration with electronic health records, provider networks and various other data streams – are certainly not in short supply. But some healthcare professionals have been eschewing the all-inclusive approach and using the foundational technology of Zoom, the Silicon Valley-based maker of enterprise video conferencing platforms. Zoom took note of those customers, and is now offering a cloud-based video telehealth service called Zoom for Telehealth.
While the company’s primary role will stay as a technology provider, the have upped their healthcare focus via an integration with Epic. The platform equips healthcare enterprises and providers with the standard, pre-configured features needed to set up telehealth operations.
“Being a high tech company, we saw many of our customers in the healthcare industry who were looking for a very targeted solution that we could provide,” Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan told MobiHealthNews. “Rather than a one-stop solution with other telemedicine providers, we want to empower other healthcare solutions already in place from experts who need technology to support it.”
This includes video, audio and content-sharing; integration with point-of-care-peripherals; virtual waiting rooms; end-to-end encryption of all meeting data and instant messages; remote camera control capabilities, and open API and SDKs to gradually bring in multiple healthcare applications. The Epic integration (which includes versions back to 2014) also allows for context-aware links to enable the launch of Zoom video visits directly from the EHR’s telehealth workflows.
“People are increasingly using telemedicine and getting reimbursed, and doctors and patients both like the idea of it,” said Yuan. “But it has to be easy to use and able to scale for huge demand, and our technology can address a lot of the issues telemedicine has been facing in terms of usability and sophistication.”
Yuan estimated about 10 to 15 percent of Zoom’s customer base are healthcare-focused, but he expects it to grow as Zoom for Telehealth is rolled out. As it progresses, the company plans to integrate as with more platforms and even connected medical devices.
“Eventually, we want to integrate as many EMR services as possible,” said Yuan. “We’re not the ones creating the programs or medical devices, so we can just focus on providing the developer platform that other companies can build their solutions onto,” Yuan said.
