“Surgeons are supporting more patients virtually, and Dolby.io enables us to get into that market and compete.”
Samuel Ethiopia, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer at DocSpera
Tech company DocSpera helps physicians and their care teams increase efficiency, transparency, and collaboration. DocSpera’s surgical planning software is used by more than 6,000 surgeons and 300 healthcare institutions to manage workflows from the moment of surgical decision to recovery.
To support increased demand for telehealth visits and simplify life for surgeons, DocSpera decided to develop its own telehealth solution.
Adapting DocSpera’s Surgical Platform to Support Increased Demand for Telehealth Visits
Evolving patient preferences combined with rapid advancements in mobile technology had already led to increased demand for virtual healthcare visits. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this trend.
“COVID-19 was the defining moment of change, but the clinical environment for surgery has been changing with many surgeons relying on fewer resources and managing more patients,” said Samuel Ethiopia, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer at DocSpera.
Some surgeons had already adopted third-party telehealth solutions, but jumping between multiple disintegrated systems was not efficient or scalable.
“We noticed that the market was shifting toward more telehealth visits, and surgeons were looking for systems that fully integrated into their workflows,” Ethiopia said. “By including an integrated telehealth experience into DocSpera, we could enable surgeons to have a more productive and less resource-intensive environment.”
DocSpera’s R&D team got to work evaluating open source and other third-party video call services, but none offered the right mix of features and affordability.
“The main barrier to entry was that they were difficult to implement and there were high startup costs in terms of development time and man-hours,” said Luca Santarella, Head of Research and Development at DocSpera. “What we needed was an easy-to-implement solution that was HIPAA compliant, secure, and offered flexible pricing with low upfront costs.”
Simplifying Telehealth for Surgeons with Dolby.io
Realizing the need for a fully managed audio video solution that’s built for healthcare, DocSpera’s R&D team began testing Dolby.io.
“Dolby.io is a very easy-to-use solution, the Interactivity APIs are easy to use, and the OAuth authentication scheme is familiar to us,” Santarella said. “Their client SDKs and UI kits were easy to implement and put on our devices—both mobile and web.”
Within one week, the team had successfully implemented the Dolby.io Interactivity APIs and was ready to pilot test its telehealth solution with surgeons. Almost immediately, praise began to roll in for DocSpera’s new feature.
“The telehealth experience that we provided through Dolby.io made it quite seamless for surgeons to easily click on and automate the interaction with their patients,” Ethiopia said. “And, they didn’t have to go from one system to another. They were able to capture what they needed in one place, chart the patient, and push it into their electronic medical record right away.”
Convenience was not the only benefit of building DocSpera’s telehealth solution with Dolby.io. Surgeons and patients enjoyed high-quality video experiences that enabled natural and lifelike conversations.
“Because Dolby.io uses a WebRTC video streaming platform, we noticed very good and very fast video results on mobile clients,” Santarella said. “Dolby.io has been a fantastic solution for us, both in terms of security and reliability.”
Leveraging Integrated Telehealth as a Market Differentiator
Rapidly developing DocSpera’s telehealth solution with Dolby.io put the company in a position to maximize revenue opportunities with new and existing customers. Some surgeons have already switched to DocSpera’s telehealth solution, and many more plan to do so in the near future.
“We’re getting quite a great reception from surgeons who are willing to have this as part of their ecosystem,” Ethiopia said. “It’s been quite easy to deploy, and it’s quite easy to get our surgeons interested in this.”
Onboarding users to the new feature is also easy—both for surgeons and the team at DocSpera.
“Surgeons really want something that is seamless and interoperable, which has always been one of our key principles in delivering products,” Ethiopia said. “The fact that people can just activate this feature automatically without needing to download software has made the rollout quite easy.”
DocSpera’s telehealth solution, powered by Dolby.io, also provides a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded healthtech industry.
“We need solutions like Dolby.io to help us move to the next level,” Ethiopia said. “The telehealth solution allows us to become more virtual and support surgeons from any location, so they’re able to provide the best services possible for their patients.”
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