COVID-19 may represent a permanent sea change in healthcare
– Will O’Connor, M.D., Chief Medical Information Officer, TigerConnect
Our recent guest on The Big Unlock podcast was TigerConnect CMIO Will O’Connor. Dr. O’Connor discusses the marketplace need they are serving to and the challenges healthcare enterprises are facing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO of Damo Consulting.
Listen to the full conversation
“We are one of the several providers in the clinical collaboration and communication space and work with providers, some big and some small. We have about 6000 customers all over the world now, mostly in the United States. At the core, we provide a communications solution that removes barriers, removes friction, and is designed to let healthcare practitioners and other people involved in healthcare, including patients, communicate easier, faster, better, more accurately.” – Will O’Connor, The Big Unlock podcast
Uptick in virtual care
TigerConnect is a HIPAA compliant clinical collaboration and communications platform. The company, to some degree, saw the severity of COVID-19 situation a little before due to their large number of customer base in Singapore, as they were impacted by Covid-19 several weeks before the United States and saw the current surge much ahead.
“We knew how serious this was, based on how they were communicating. It really gave us some good hints at what we needed to do here to help prepare our overall messages. To go to 4 million messages to 5 million messages, it took us about one hundred and sixty days and that happened late last year. We went from 5 million messages to 6 million messages growth in just 10 days. So, we saw this tremendous growth starting in Singapore and now that has translated across the United States as well.” – Will O’Connor
A 9/11 moment for healthcare
Dr. O’Connor believes that in the last two to three weeks we have made 10-15 years of advancement in telehealth and hopes that this will represent a permanent sea change in the industry. He further believes that, the need to keep the patients away from the physician’s facility and deliver care remotely is going to be with us for a long time.
“As every other health system, we have tried to minimize disruption in operations. Our service desk been doing very well. Communication is the key for us and getting proper communication out to people. For example, when we started this telemedicine expansion, we’ve set up on our ACD, our automated call distribution.” – John
