The Transformative Impact of COVID-19 on Telehealth in Hospitals
The evolution of telehealth in hospitals has been dramatically reshaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, transitioning from a minimal focus in strategic discussions to a critical component of patient care. Prior to the pandemic, telehealth solutions like Electronic Intensive Care Units (EICUs) were rarely discussed at the executive level, resulting in sporadic implementation and limited investment. However, the urgency to protect patients and staff during the crisis led to the rapid deployment of costly, proprietary solutions that often lacked interoperability and long-term viability. Moving forward, hospitals must shift from reactive measures to a strategic, integrated approach that prioritizes sustainable telehealth solutions, interoperability, and effective training to enhance patient care and operational efficiency.
Listen to Narinder Singh and Eric Yablonka discuss the transformative impact of COVID-19 on telehealth in hospitals.
Video Transcript
Narinder Singh:
And so I think we’ll get a chance to talk a little bit about that past and future. And it’s a good transition because tele and the hospitals has been around and it’s not really been that big a deal, the EICU solutions, some sitter solutions. But because of that rapid kind of shock of covid, people now think video is going to be in every room. But just before we get to the future for a second, the last generation of tell in the hospital kind of disappointing, I bet it wasn’t a conversation you were talking about with your CEO. How do you think about that genre of tele and was it ever something that was strategic inside the hospital prior to Covid?
Eric Yablonka:
Yeah, so no, that wouldn’t be something I would typically talk to the CEO about unless it was a pending or critical case to discuss. So we did particularly with the onset of the pandemic go hard with solutions around tele and those solutions were pretty expensive and we were just slamming stuff in because we really needed not only to protect our patients but also protect our staff. And so we had these proprietary solutions, high cost, low interoperability sort of point solutions, and they got us through the pandemic but not sustainable for an enterprise wide rollout.