Yadhu Gopalan is the co-founder and CEO of Esper. He has held senior engineering roles at Microsoft and Amazon, where he developed software systems for Amazon Go concept stores.
As more healthcare service providers pursue opportunities in telemedicine, there’s a growing awareness that the hardware devices that deliver those services are a make-or-break part of a successful telemedicine strategy. The good news is that new software solutions and increased availability of dedicated hardware makes in-home care easier than ever to roll out and manage.
I am the co-founder and CEO of Esper, the first software platform for intelligently managing large numbers of dedicated hardware devices. Our solution provides the infrastructure that allows telemedicine hardware to be managed remotely without involving users (your patients). Think of it as making the hardware “invisible” to the user with no troubleshooting asked of them.
We work with new and established healthcare providers offering solutions like patient monitoring, telehealth, and other in-home solutions. I’d like to share my perspective on how your early software and hardware decisions impact the overall quality of your in-home care solution.
The Unique Dynamics of In-Home Healthcare
Telemedicine is a massive opportunity whose growth was propelled by the pandemic. Yet success here requires navigating some very specific requirements.
The first dynamic is the simple fact that the patient doesn’t buy or select the “product”. Care providers make those decisions, usually based on existing relationships between the hospital/practice and solution providers. This means patients often start with little or no attachment to the solution and the hardware that delivers it. Contrast that with the feeling of unboxing a new smartphone for personal use.
That detachment fuels a second, related dynamic: patients don’t want to – or simply cannot – troubleshoot these systems. A well-designed telemedicine solution must account for users without tech savvy or who simply don’t want to fiddle with settings. This plays into care compliance as well; a monitoring device that goes offline can potentially put a patient at risk. Patients are people and these days most people have a clear expectation that their technology products should “just work”. That’s doubly true in telehealth.
So if you can’t ask your users to troubleshoot, how do you ensure your devices keep working? It’s all in your infrastructure.
Technology Infrastructure Is the Secret to Telemedicine Success
I’m an engineer by training, so bear with me as I get a little technical here. Over the past decade, a time when almost all new software was intended for the cloud, a trend called DevOps emerged to improve how software (and now hardware) is coded, deployed, and managed. It is centered on improved orchestration between teams and using the latest automation tools to streamline productivity throughout the system.
You can credit DevOps with vastly improving how engineers and IT operations teams collaborate to improve the performance of software and hardware solutions. Most developer and operations teams today are already using DevOps practices when they create and maintain business apps. We launched Esper to bring the benefits of DevOps to dedicated device space that previously lacked the sort of standardized infrastructure you find in cloud app development.
A DevOps-based technical infrastructure improves patient care in many ways:
- Automation can free healthcare workers to apply their skills where needed most (they, too, shouldn’t be troubleshooting)
- Device telemetry (performance data) ensures that devices are always connected and performing as intended
- Infrastructure software can streamline security and compliance by increasing how often a hardware device receives updated software and security patches
These benefits aren’t theoretical. We’ve seen first-hand how some very innovative companies designed “invisible” telemedicine solutions.
Here’s What Moved the Needle for Spire Healthcare
We can look at Spire Healthcare to see this idea of “invisible hardware” in action. Utilizing respiratory trackers, Spire Health provides patients with monitoring for chronic respiratory disease. The wear-at-home trackers connect to mobile phones using Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) to track biometric data and send patient status alerts to care providers much earlier than traditional monitoring.
Spire Health entered the market just as the demand for remote patient monitoring spiked with the onset of the pandemic. For Spire, finding a partner who understood that at-home tracking for sick and elderly patients requires a simple setup was essential. To scale amidst a global shutdown, the Spire team needed to:
- Work remotely with a non-tech-savvy patient population
- Remotely fix connectivity issues between wearable sensors and mobile devices
- Keep support costs low with a nascent in-house IT team
- Utilize an LTE connection rather than relying on WiFi in order to better serve the patient population
- Maintain HIPPA compliance and meet healthcare security standards
Hands-off remote troubleshooting, cost controls, and compliance considerations are common requirements for many in-home healthcare solutions. Spire was able to get to market quickly using Esper infrastructure and purpose-built hardware devices.
I hope this engineer’s perspective has helped you think about how your own company manages its telehealth solutions. By keeping the patient in mind at all times, many of the software and hardware decisions quickly fall into place. Long gone are the days where an in-home care solution provider needs to start from scratch or devote years of investment to laying the technical foundation for their success.
About Esper for Healthcare
The market-leading Esper platform empowers healthcare organizations to easily deploy and manage Android applications and devices from a single pane of glass. And the world’s most innovative global health companies trust Esper’s Android DevOps platform to deploy devices at scale because of our commitment to information safety. With deep expertise in OS and cloud backend, our robust security and compliance infrastructure is optimized for digital healthcare and telehealth use cases.
