Podcast: Telehealth is the biggest story in IT right now

As much of the working world decamped to home offices, a revolution occurred in one of the nation’s largest industries. Healthcare went contactless. Since the earliest writings on the practice of medicine, healthcare has been a contact sport, a tactile occupation. As with many other things impacted by the pandemic, a model that has stood for millennia has been disrupted. “It's probably the biggest story in IT right now, how do we help healthcare organizations adopt a completely new way of dealing with patients,” says Gregg Smith, CEO of Remote Care Partners. In this podcast Smith outlines the immediate crises of healthcare, an industry with empty waiting rooms, shelter-in-place homebound patients and clinicians, meaning both barriers to the delivery of care and revenue. While news broadcasts riveting images of overwhelmed hospitals, the thousands of offices and clinics that provide the more routine care most people consume when not in hospital, are siting near idle. Smith points out that telemedicine consists of much more than a teleconference call. Telemedicine is actually the blending of many IT and UC technologies, hardware, programming and services, to not only provide doctor patient dialogue, but a flow of diagnostic information to the clinician with an overlay of real time communications between patient and doctor and patient and clinic. Smith describes his company’s RCP Hub that eliminates the chaos that occurs where patients needs to pair Bluetooth devices with incumbent WiFi available at the patients home or work. Smith then outlines how his company has worked to create a straightforward method of delivering health care metrics to the clinician, combined with messaging, conferencing and other communication tools that allows for the delivery of care, while remaining within regulatory boundaries.  We also learn that Remote Care Partners has thought through the medical economics of care. Their system also sets up billable services which are critical in making telehealth a practical activity. Visit https://www.remotecarepartners.com/