Telemedicine - Breaking Down The Barriers To Change

I have been speaking about the importance of text-based mobile interactions for over a decade. It is great to see the technology being leveraged for some life-saving telehealth and telemedecine solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thanks so much to Robyn Bainbridge for the opportunity to speak alongside Dr Luke James, Kim-Fredrik Schneider, Bettina Gammelgaard, Robin Ingle, Patrick Graham and Michelle Elmore about the new normal of telehealth. This is a very well researched long read in the latest edition of ITIJ in print and online. Here are a few quotes:

“What was barely acceptable a few years ago is unforgivable today,” Oisin Lunny told ITIJ, commenting on the familiar scenario of a customer being forced to join a call centre queue to speak to their service provider. ” Spurred by our transition to a UX-obsessed planet of phono-sapiens, consumers have zero tolerance for a bad customer experience. While the insurance industry has arguably taken some years to grapple with the new normal of tech-empowered consumers, the good news is that the innovation cavalry has arrived just in time.”

Reasoning that video calls are not for everyone and can be as time-consuming and archaic as in-person visits, Lunny explains that a text-based consultation (a form of ‘micro-consultation’) with a real doctor strikes the perfect balance. These asynchronous micro-consultations, Lunny continues to explain, are enabling consumers to interact with healthcare providers wherever they are, at their own pace, on their own terms, and in a nonintrusive fashion.

“AI and machine learning under the hood is the icing on the cake, ensuring a frictionless user experience that gets better every time,” he said. “Textbased micro-consultations are a genuine life-saver, both for consumers who feel more at home so utilise the platform more, and for insurance companies who can see the storm clouds of disruption forming.”
Oisin Lunny in Telemedicine – Breaking Down The Barriers To Change from ITIJ