Teladoc Health announced Wednesday that it is launching two new AI-powered capabilities built into its Solo smart care platform for hospitals and health systems to be used during virtual visits.
SoloVitals, which captures patients’ heart rate and respiratory rate using only the camera on their device, will be available for private preview with select customers, with wider availability expected in December. The New York-based telemedicine company did not identify those customers. SoloScribe, an ambient, EHR-integrated documentation tool, is now generally available.
Both tools integrate with the already-established Solo virtual care platform, so that the more than 15,000 global customers can smoothly integrate the new capabilities without the need to add new technology, according to the company’s news release. SoloVitals and SoloScribe aim to support patient care operations and reduce technology fragmentation across health systems so that providers can keep their focus where it’s truly needed – on the patient.
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“SoloVitals addresses a common gap many hospital virtual care teams experience, where they cannot collect real-time physiologic data from patients during a virtual visit,” said Joby McKenzie, general manager of North American health systems at Teladoc Health.
Danny Sanchez, vice president of technology and innovation at Teladoc Health, explained how SoloVitals collects patient vital signs contactlessly.
“During intake for a virtual visit, the patient uses the camera on their own device to capture supported vital signs of heart rate and respiration rate,” Sanchez said. “It uses remote photoplethysmography(“rPPG”) to detect very small changes in the color of the skin caused by blood flow. This data is combined with a computer vision assessment of patients’ fine movements and is then evaluated by sophisticated algorithms to return multiple physiologic measurements.”
Results are then available for the provider before or during the virtual visit, offering real-time physiologic data which can help to inform care decisions. Sanchez noted that patients do not need to download a separate app, and that the process is guided by on-screen prompts to facilitate a smooth user experience.
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SoloScribe offers ambient AI documentation – that alone is not unique, but what makes SoloScribe stand out is simple: it doesn’t require hospital systems to apply new technology. It works within the Solo platform that’s already integrated into the EHR – be it Epic or Oracle Health.
“Most ambient scribe tools on the market ask hospitals to buy, install and manage one more piece of technology,” said Sanchez. “Our clients keep telling us they want the opposite: new capabilities built into the products and workflows they already know and use.”
This goes to the heart of one of the biggest challenges health systems face today, that McKenzie identified as “technology fragmentation.”
She added that “each new capability comes with another vendor, another login, another device, or another workflow. The larger opportunity of integration is to help health systems move from a collection of disconnected tools to a more unified care environment.”
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