Telehealth has come a long way from being perceived as an academic toy among healthcare professionals to an essential, mainstream tool for patient care. Modern technology now allows providers to connect with their patients over cell phones, tablets and computers, both inside and outside the hospital, but maintaining reliable connectivity has become a significant struggle.

Good Wi-Fi is critical for telehealth, yet most hospitals are not equipped to handle constant video broadcasting from every room, making it difficult for telemedicine solutions to function when the enterprise network goes down.

In turn, this downtime can plummet provider efficiency and patient satisfaction while disturbing clinical workflow and putting patients at risk. What’s more, every minute of network downtime costs hospitals an average of $9,000, according to Uptime’s 2022 Outage Analysis.

Solving Connectivity Conundrums

Committed to innovating the future of telehealth, we have worked tirelessly at Vitalchat to overcome these challenges. We understand the gravity of connectivity issues and developed two key features to help hospitals and clinics leverage telehealth as a fundamental part of the care continuum:

• Video Analytics: We realized video was not always necessary, so we developed and patented a video analytics solution. This feature uses edge computing to monitor patients and hospital spaces for changes, transferring metadata 24/7 — but only using video when required for a visit or an alert. This reduces bandwidth for most hospitals by 15- to 20-fold.
• Bandwidth Preservation: We patented roll-over bandwidth technology that guarantees our devices will work — even in an emergency. Our devices, whether they are carts or telemedicine-enabled TVs, search for the best-available Wi-Fi and seamlessly switch among the standard enterprise Wi-Fi, guest Wi-Fi and LTE to ensure every device stays online.

While traditionally utilized for remote care, telehealth is quickly becoming an essential part of the inpatient experience — especially in a post-pandemic world where we need to rethink the system and put humanity back into healthcare.

However, moving from a niche opportunity to an all-encompassing system that makes video standard in everyday care will continue to present unexpected obstacles. The team at Vitalchat is constantly innovating and looking for ways to make telehealth work more efficiently on a larger scale. With our patented video analytics and roll-over bandwidth technology, hospitals and clinics can maximize telehealth potential and stay up and running in the face of unexpected challenges.

Experience It Yourself

I encourage you to explore our AI-enabled telehealth solutions and request a demo to see our bandwidth-friendly software in action. In just 15 minutes, we can not only explain how to overcome connectivity challenges, but we can give you a glimpse into the telehealth technologies that are redefining care quality and driving a near-immediate ROI at facilities and systems nationwide.