Vonage and PubNub Create Compliant Telehealth Solutions

This article was originally posted on Vonage's blog here.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused huge disruptions across industries, including healthcare. Healthcare systems overwhelmed by rising cases have pushed the global healthcare industry to reevaluate the delivery of services and the overall patient journey. To control the spread of the virus, hospitals, doctors, and service providers had to quickly adopt digital technologies to create new treatment approaches to supplement traditional in-person care.

Even before the pandemic, telemedicine had emerged as a vital way for a host of healthcare services to operate—spanning diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and consultations. And over the last few years, patients have become more receptive to digital alternatives. So while the pandemic didn’t kick off the interest in telehealth, it has significantly normalized and increased adoption of digital solutions in healthcare. Moving forward, these digital care models will continue to shape the future of the healthcare industry. Telemedicine isn’t going anywhere.

Healthcare providers need to adapt to this “new normal” to make healthcare more accessible while simultaneously continuing to harness and retain the experience of in-person care. Together, Vonage and PubNub are expanding the ways patients can interact and communicate with their care team—be it by chat, voice, video, WhatsApp, or SMS.

Our partnership gives doctors, patients, and healthcare providers control over how they choose to communicate—this helps make their interactions more authentic and genuine, which is invaluable to patients today. Patients compare their telehealth interactions to the consumer experiences they are accustomed to, and they expect the same familiar responsiveness and features when communicating virtually with their care team. Healthcare providers must offer patients an uncomplicated and personal experience powered by technology that integrates seamlessly into existing systems and adheres to the necessary regulatory guidelines. This partnership between Vonage and PubNub meets all these needs.

Secure doctor-patient communication with best-in-class compliance

PubNub is a developer platform that powers the chat infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where communities can truly connect and share experiences that are as authentic as in-person ones.

For healthcare customers, in order for care teams and patients to comfortably connect and communicate, security is a must. It is essential that patients always feel their sensitive health information is protected when shared in telemedicine and digital health platforms. With PubNub, healthcare customers not only benefit from the flexibility and cost-savings offered by the PubNub platform, but the security compliance as well. All chat built with PubNub is fully secure and HIPAA compliant. And all of our features like mobile push notifications, online/offline detection, file uploads, and more work seamlessly within these secure chats.

Healthcare companies looking to add voice and video calling into their digital care platforms can also rest assured these channels are secure with Vonage. The Vonage Communications Platform (VCP) enables healthcare organizations to build HIPAA-compliant solutions using SMS and Video to provide secure patient journeys across their preferred communication channels.

This includes video consultations, group discussion sessions, care and drug reminders, status notifications, critical alerts, and more.

Transforming healthcare for today and tomorrow

Leveraging PubNub and Vonage, healthcare providers do not have to build these crucial capabilities from the ground up. By relying on the expertise of these two platforms, Vonage and PubNub customers are empowered to build HIPAA-compliant solutions that provide reliable, high-quality communication experiences to their patients—all while retaining full control, functionality, and flexibility with integrations to services like EHR lookup, translation, and medical language processing.

Thanks to this partnership, Vonage and PubNub are empowering healthcare customers, like Nuup Healthcare, Doxy.me and Babylon Health, to address challenges including:

HIPAA-compliant collaboration across popular channels (voice, video, chat, messaging).
Secure access with 2FA.
Sending smart notifications using on/offline status, geo, and sensor data.
Language translation for multilingual communication.
Facilitating sharing of time-sensitive data with key stakeholders.
Leveraging AI for automating doctor/patient engagement.
Real-time dispatch and location tracking for patient transport services.
Real-time monitoring and control of IoT devices.
Ensuring security and legislative compliance.

Learn more about how the Vonage Communications Platform and PubNub can help you build reliable, secure, compliant, and seamless patient/doctor experiences by getting in touch with one of our experts.

4 Noteworthy Voice-Enabled Technology Stacks

Over the past few years, there has been increasing attention placed into speech and voice enabling technologies, whether for convenience, accessibility, or safety/hands-free driving and machine operation. As devices such as Amazon Echo that operate entirely through voice control gain popularity, user behavior and expectations are shifting from web-based to voice-based user experiences in many everyday settings. Siri’s voice control is available throughout the Apple hardware ecosystem: on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, CarPlay, and now, with the advent of macOS Sierra, to laptops and desktops. “Google Now” has similarly expanded from Android phones and tablets to Chromebooks, Android Wear, Android TV, Android Auto, and the brand new Google Home initiative. Microsoft includes text-to-speech and speech-to-text features into Surface-based tablets and PCs, brings voice features to the forefront with Cortana in Windows 10, and is developing a new connected car initiative with Windows Embedded Automotive 7. Seeing a pattern yet? It seems as though anywhere a device may operate, voice control, dictation and text-to-speech features are becoming an important, if not primary, means of user interaction. This requires always-on data connections, as the bulk of non-specialized voice recognition still takes place in cloud services. (Over time, more and more speech SDK’s are allowing disconnected operation, if only on specialized data sets.) In this article, we’ll explore the major providers and SDKs out there and lay the groundwork for upcoming articles on Voice Commands, Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech. It might be worth taking a moment to explain what we’re talking about when we mention Voice Control, Dictation, and Text-To-Speech. Voice Control refers to the ability of a device to respond to spoken commands, typically using a wake phrase and specialized/restricted language for the commands, such as “OK Google, directions from Boston to New York” on an Android device using Google Now. Dictation refers to the ability to enter free text using spoken word only. This is more challenging because it typically requires language selection (English versus Spanish, Japanese, etc), has higher complexity without a restricted vocabulary, requires knowledge of key words and phrases to enter punctuation and formatting instructions, and is typically impractical to edit by voice after the fact. Lastly, Text-To-Speech refers to the ability of a device to turn written text into audio of the spoken words. Text-To-Speech typically has challenges due to pronunciation errors in the speech engine, language detection/selection, placement of emphasis, detection of inline entities

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