Telehealth meets artificial intelligence: Zoom reimagined
Far gone are now the days where attending healthcare appointments meant battling heavy traffic and parking. Routine check-ups, specialist consultations, group therapy and support, physical therapy and rehabilitation – you don’t even have to leave the house.
That’s where Zoom shines.
Zoom for telehealth purposes: virtual meetings taking over
Zoom enables seamless communication and collaboration, completely revolutionizing healthcare operations. Administration management, virtual appointments, treatment planning, patient engagement and monitoring – Zoom became almost indispensable across modern healthcare settings.
Since 2011, the platform’s first launch, Zoom achieved noticeable milestones:
| In 2011 | First launch |
| In 2016 | HIPAA compliance |
| In 2019 | – Zoom for Telehealth launch – Epic integration |
| In 2020 | – 2.2 million new users – 2.13 million new downloads |
| In 2021 | – Zoom for Healthcare rebranding – New integrations (Practice Better, Strmr, IntakeQ) |
| In 2022 | – Cerner compatibility – Allscripts compatibility |
| In 2023 | – New partnerships including Teladoc and Meditech – Global presence (United Kingdom, Canada, Australia) |
| In 2024 | – GDPR compliance – CCPA compliance |
Zoom for telehealth services: key features
Zoom Meeting
Zoom Meeting enables remote doctor-patient interaction, which increases healthcare accessibility and quality. High-definition video and audio, data encryption, screen sharing, screen recording, and other useful capabilities almost eliminate existing limitations.
The benefits:
- Virtual consultations for diagnosis, treatment planning, and follow-ups
- Patient monitoring to observe chronic conditions
- Specialist consultations to connect with professionals on complex healthcare problems
- Family involvement to ensure family members are informed and engaged
Zoom Phone
Zoom Phone enables secured telephonic communication, which expands telehealth accessibility and efficiency. Call routing, call encryption, conferencing, forwarding, voicemail management, and other essential capabilities – already built-in.
The benefits:
- Telehealth hotline to provide appointment scheduling, medical advice, and support
- Appointment reminders to minimize patient no-shows
- Patient follow-ups to address urgent concerns
- Voicemail management to process patient inquiries even outside office hours
Zoom Rooms
Zoom Rooms, another feature, are dedicated conferencing environments for meetings between professionals. These provide speaker tracking and framing, interactive whiteboarding, content sharing, multi-screen support, and other conferencing capabilities.
The benefits:
- Team meetings for convenient internal updates, care coordination, and consultations
- Administrative meetings for easy strategic planning, compliance discussions, and reviews
- Specialist referrals for collaborative treatment planning and remote second opinions
- Training sessions for technical skills training, staff onboarding, and workshops
Team Chat
Team Chat, another popular Zoom feature, is a messaging platform for communication between professionals. It provides real-time conversations, media sharing, threaded conversations, chat history and search, and more.
The benefits:
- Care discussions for patient care reviews
- Care coordination for real-time status updates, multidisciplinary meetings, and decision-making
- Task management for patient discharge coordination, task assignment, and monitoring
- Record sharing for lab result transmission, note exchange, and medical image sharing
Zoom for healthcare operations: practical application
| Administration management | – Board meetings – Budget reviews and planning – Vendor negotiations – Stakeholder presentations – Candidate recruitment – Performance evaluation – Quality auditing and monitoring – Strategic goal-setting and tracking – Crisis management – Emergency coordination |
| Employee education and training | – Employee onboarding – Certification courses – Leadership programs – Mentorship programs – Simulation training – Technical training – Peer groups and discussions – Professional webinars and workshops – Question-and-answer sessions – Regulatory training |
| Patient-centric care | – Virtual consultations & follow-ups – Progress reviews – Case management – Disease management – Group sessions – Multidisciplinary discussions – Pre-surgical consultations and preparation – Post-surgical assessment and monitoring – Discharge planning – Post-discharge follow-ups |
| Family involvement and support | – Family consultations – Emotional support – Patient updates – Discharge coordination – Health education – Caregiver training – Virtual visits – End-of-life discussions |
Zoom changing healthcare routines: what are the benefits?
Increased accessibility
The platform breaks down countless barriers standing between a high-quality healthcare service and patients. Chronic conditions, illness exposure, physical disabilities, inconvenient scheduling, and other common barriers won’t cause real obstacles.
Your patients can connect from their living room, office, café, or even tree house – who cares?
Reduced strain
The platform helps fight employee-carried overload and burnout and deliver healthcare services without stress. No more juggling endless phone calls, running around clinic corridors, no more interrupted breaks, no walk-ins.
Fewer logistics, fewer headaches.
More hours, fewer gaps
Healthcare professionals can extend billing hours without worrying about making other staff working longer. More hours, fewer gaps – everyone’s happy.
And hard-to-find parking spots are now not excuses for no-shows.
No exposure to illnesses
Now here’s the kicker, no germ-sharing between patients – a win for everyone, in particular high-risk patients. No chance of catching an infection from that one stranger who says his sneezing and coughing isn’t contagious.
Less germs, less risks.
Artificial intelligence to complement Zoom meetings
Pose detection for your Zoom application: our solution
We investigated the scenarios and approaches to extend Zoom meetings by implementing artificial intelligence. More specifically, by combining machine learning, image preprocessing, landmark detection, skeletal modeling, and other advanced techniques.
We designed an application to streamline physical therapy and rehabilitation by embedding computer vision:
- To begin, we obtain the real-time video stream directly from the meeting
- Moving further, we handle the real-time video analysis by applying pose estimation
- The results are almost immediately displayed on the call screen
- After that, a report is sent to the attending clinician to be further analyzed
And, by the way, you should check out our take on integrating medical devices to enrich telehealth platforms.
Pose detection to support Zoom consultations: how does it work?
To undergo the examination and receive accurate diagnosis, the patient must follow these steps:
- Open the Zoom meeting though link
- Adjust settings including video and audio
- Join the Zoom meeting:
- Either starting the meeting by himself if the health assessment is conducted without assistance
- Or entering the meeting when admitted by the physical therapist in a face-to-face examination
- Perform the prescribed exercises
By recognizing the head, shoulders, elbows, and hands, the solution can analyze multiple indicators:
- Shoulder elevation and depression
- Elbow flexion and extension
- Arm pronation and supination
- Arm extension and retraction
- Scapular retraction and protraction
- Wrist flexion and extension, and many other parameters!
Artificial intelligence to rethink telehealth meetings: the benefits
Increased accessibility
Our application can eliminate the barriers for individuals who struggle with attending in-person appointments. These include geographic location, transportation difficulties, mobility impairments, childcare responsibilities, and other common challenges.
Reduced times and cost
Our application can facilitate better thought-out resource allocation across different healthcare environments. Office space, facility maintenance, scheduling conflicts, waiting times, throughput pressure, patient no-shows – no longer a problem.
More insights
By using artificial intelligence during assessments, healthcare professionals might obtain valuable information. That includes joint angles, posture alignment, motion range, movement deviation, and other important details.
Greater accuracy
And don’t forget precision – by applying computer vision, physical therapists also achieve greater accuracy. That means objective assessment, correct diagnoses, better aligned treatment programs, and, accordingly, faster recovery.
How we can help
How can healthcare providers go beyond Zoom integration to facilitate telehealth delivery and innovation?
Abto Software designs custom, regulatory compliant enterprise-level products to empower healthcare leaders. Greater precision, objective assessment, real-time feedback and guidance, progress tracking and visualization – our solutions can change the game.
Our services:
- .NET development
- ASP.NET development
- Web app development
- Mobile app development
- Cloud services
- AI development services
- Full-cycle, custom software development
Our expertise:
FAQ
Of course, the platform, along with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and others, has several telehealth features. Virtual consultations, secure messaging, appointment scheduling, media sharing, and other helpful features – there’s everything you need.
It is as easy as making a cup of coffee:
- Get a business account
- Create a waiting room
- Send out invite links
- And voila, you can now provide telehealth with Zoom Workspace
The platform isn’t “approved” in the stamp-of-approval meaning, that’s simply not how regulations function. The platform is compliant – it meets the requirements it should in order to be used within healthcare settings.
You should make sure you’re using Zoom for Healthcare obviously, not the free version for daily small talk.
The platform is safe, but only if set up correctly – it offers end-to-end encryption, access controls, and more. Unauthorized access, improperly configured waiting rooms, unsecured storage, screen sharing data exposure –
But remind your patients not to share their Zoom links, to be on the safe side.
