Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic about one-and-a-half years ago, Zoom has been stuck in the lives of office workers as if it were a synonym to video conference.

Still, not many people would know Zoom has also entered into the healthcare business.

Actually, however, Zoom had shown great interest in the healthcare sector even before the novel coronavirus hit the world. Zoom first introduced its virtual health service as “Zoom for Telehealth” in 2017 and changed its name to “Zoom for Healthcare” with upgraded functions. The service allows health providers to diagnose patients and use them for education.

“People got accustomed to the telehealth due to Covid-19 pandemic, and it will be difficult to return to the pre-pandemic health service style, which made us jump on the healthcare bandwagon,” Zoom Global Healthcare Lead Ron Emerson said in an interview with Korea Biomedical Review.

Zoom is actively targeting the telemedicine market that has grown steeply riding on the Covid-19 pandemic and regards Korea is as a market with great potential. “As we expand the business to the entire world, Korea is emerging as an important market,” Emerson said.

It was the first time he had an interview with a Korean media outlet.   

Question: Since the Covid-19 outbreak, Zoom has emerged as the video conference service provider used most in Korea. However, other services you provide are relatively less known among the Korean people.

Answer: Zoom is a leading platform worldwide that provides unified communication as a service (UCaaS), including video conferences. Zoom has won the title as a leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions for five straight years and the leading position in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for UCaaS. We have a solid foundation for the service, and we are proud to provide a comprehensive service to keep the world connected easily and safely.

We have been working to enhance the convenience and accessibility of our UCaaS, which combines Zoom Meetings, Zoom Chat, and Zoom Phone, to make video meetings as similar as possible to in-person meetings.

Zoom also has been advancing the business to the healthcare sector by providing video conferencing, application programming interfaces (APIs) to partner with electronic health record (EHR) vendors and mobile schedules applications, and technology developments.

Zoom is used for virtual meetings with patients, medical education, facility-based telemedicine, and overall public health in the healthcare field.

Q: Has Zoom initiated new projects since the Covid-19 pandemic?

A: We introduced more than 400 new features and several other new services in 2020 to better serve users’ personal and business communication needs.

Zoom Apps, Zoom for Home, and Zoom Events are the exemplary services we provide.

Zoom Apps allows the customers to use various other applications before, during, and after the meetings for smooth progress and management with improved engagement. Zoom for Home helps employees to communicate and collaborate with the company with ease at their homes. Zoom Events also provides a virtual space built to host and attend endless online meetings for the users.

In addition to the three services, Zoom 5.0 uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-Galois Counter Mode (GCM) carried out with 256-bit for all meetings and other advanced security enhancements and host controls. It also provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE), giving users the ability to host meetings where nobody except each participant can access the encryption keys being used in the meeting.

As our platform has grown rapidly throughout the world, we have focused on tightening the security, adding security icons for comprehensive online meeting controls, reporting user function, and other subdivided data routing options. 

Q: When did your company begin providing healthcare services? Also, which factors attracted the interest of the field?

A: We saw the potential in the healthcare sector long before the Covid-19 outbreak and introduced Zoom for Telehealth, which is now known as Zoom for Healthcare, in 2017. It helps users follow Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and have medical institutes such as Phoenix Children’s Hospital and Magellan Health.

Q: What businesses are going on at Zoom Global Healthcare plan?

A: Zoom for Healthcare aids clinicians and other workers to provide quality and cost-effective solutions to meet the needs of medical institutions. Various applications, including telehealth, collaborative healthcare, medical education, and population-based care, are effectively used across medical institutions, small or large.

Q: What are the unique technologies that Zoom provides in the healthcare sector?

A: Our service allows users to share secured video, audio, and content through desktops, mobile phones, and conference devices. The service can be used in waiting rooms to keep patient privacy, and it can also be used with applications, such as Epic, Strmr, IntakeQ, and Practice Better.

The service also gives access to control the remote camera easily and allows integrated use with diagnostic cameras and other point-of-care devices, including digital stethoscopes.

Q: The Covid-19 pandemic has led many countries to adopt telemedicine. How has Zoom been used in the market?

A: Since the Covid-19 hit the planet, Zoom has taken more than 43 percent of the virtual meeting market, according to Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and Gartner.

We plan to integrate our technology and health information technology systems by providing a real-time virtual meeting between the patient and clinician.

Our service is not simply a virtual care and telemedicine platform but a multi-purpose platform that can satisfy the needs of healthcare institutions. It can be used for administrative tasks, including telemedicine, medical team meetings, recruitment, medical education, employee training, and disease prevention.

Analyzing electronic records managed by Zoom could provide meaningful insights into patient care.

Q: Some have pointed out that Zoom has a weakness in security. Korean doctors and civic groups have also raised concerns about patients’ private information leaking from telemedicine. How has Zoom dealt with the problem?

A: We take our user privacy very seriously. We have taken measures to optimize our platform security and improved private data protection.

We launched Zoom 5.0 last year with many security enhancements and features to help users protect their private meetings after acquiring Keybase to build E2EE.

To facilitate an ongoing dialogue on security and privacy best practices, we worked with major chief information security officers (CISO) in the field. As a result, we launched the CISO council to operate data routing controls.

We also added the security icon in the online meeting to allow the host or co-host to control options to minimize disruption during a session. For example, users can freeze the meeting, open a waiting room, and hide profile pictures through the security icon.

At the end of 2020, we implemented At-Risk Meeting Notifier to help users respond to disruptions. The function detects a meeting at risk, notifies the account holder via e-mail, and gives guidelines to deal with the problem.

We applied more E2EE features, expanded to support meetings of up to 1000 participants, and launched our Trust Center. We also implemented a feature that warns when there is unencrypted traffic, giving users the option to block the specific traffic.

Zoom also has features that protect health information and personal information protection. In addition, the advanced encryption standard technology protects data in transit at the application layer and allows advanced encryption so that only the recipient can read the messages.

As part of our commitment to privacy and security, we have built a strong security team to support all new users. We have hired more than 200 employees to strengthen security and protect privacy this year.

Q: The use of video conferences increased sharply due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is the same in the healthcare sector. However, some have pointed out that the growth is relatively slower compared to other fields. What do you think?

A: Healthcare organizations are now using high-quality video to provide care to patients directly in their homes.

The use of telehealth has increased about 50 to 175 times after the Covid-19 outbreak. Healthcare workers believe that telehealth has developed more in the recent six months than in the last decade.

Amazingly, nearly 1.3 million Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S. received care virtually in the third week of April 2020, whereas only 11,000 people used telehealth service in the first week of March 2020.

Q: Korea does not allow telemedicine because many doctors have negative thoughts on the service as they believe there is a risk of misdiagnosis. Some have also expressed concerns that it could just make people unduly rely on large hospitals. What do you think of these concerns?

A: Telehealth will continue to play a key role in a hybrid model of healthcare that emphasizes treating patients where and how they prefer. The related industry will benefit from reduced cost, fewer resource wastes, increased access to care, and improved patient outcomes with the changing paradigm.

We believe the demand for telehealth would continue to grow. Only about 11 percent of patients chose telehealth in 2019, but the figure increased by three times and reached 46 percent by April 2020. Frost and Sullivan, a global research and consulting firm, predicted that the telehealth market to grow sevenfold by 2025.

Q: Do you think the telemedicine market will grow in Korea? Any specific plans to enter the Korean market?

A: According to a survey conducted by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), 62.1 percent of participants showed positive responses for applying telehealth in Korea, three times more than the 18.1 percent who responded negatively.

However, the number of investments in the domestic bio and medicine sector decreased in 2020 compared to the largest-ever investments made in a global society.

The research by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, the investments in bio and medicine dropped from 559.2 billion won ($533.3 million) in the first half of 2019 to 425.6 billion won during the same period in the following year.

The Asan Nanum Foundation presented that the domestic digital healthcare market stagnated in 2020 due to the domestic system that regulates remote healthcare services.

Korea’s digital healthcare market is mostly focused on hardware manufacturers. However, we believe telemedicine will become an inevitable trend in the healthcare sector.

We have been expanding our business globally, and Korea is an important market for us. Korean companies and government offices use Zoom to take care of their works, and even Seoul National University uses our service to give lectures.

We believe the virtual services reflect consumer’s thoughts, which we expect Korea to adopt the newly changing trend.

Q: What is the future of telemedicine that Zoom is painting?

A: Most experts agree that the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 has transformed the global medical landscape. Patients and health providers are now more familiar and comfortable with telehealth, so it’s hard to imagine asking them to resume old ways.

Zoom has collaborated with the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) to how the explosive demand for virtual care has impacted and will continue to influence the medical industry for the next decade.

We have concluded that consumers will drive demand for virtual care.

The pandemic may have worked as a catalyst for the widespread adoption of virtual care, but telehealth would not drift away even when the Covid-19 goes under control.

Forrester, a global market research company, forecasted that nearly 500 million virtual visits would occur in the U.S. in 2021. In addition, analysts say that mental and behavioral health services will take up a third of all virtual visits, indicating enormous potential for technology to address mental health needs.

“Patients will be unhappy if all types of virtual healthcare services go dry,” said Dr. Lee Schwamm, who serves as an executive vice chair of neurology, director of Center for Telehealth, and vice president of virtual care and digital health at Mass General Brigham in Boston, Massachusetts.

Also, health organizations are looking for other fields to apply telehealth.

Medical institutions are considering the next step to integrate virtual services to patient care and management as it can provide a more efficient workflow and share information with ease. Using virtual conferences can quickly provide healthcare service and competitiveness.

Physicians, nurses, dietitians, social workers, physical therapists, care managers, and others can reach patients via virtual meetings, providing greater access to care regardless of time and location.

Q: Is there anything you would like to suggest to Korean doctors who still have negative perceptions toward telemedicine?

A: We all are going through a hard time with social distancing policy, remote working, limited office hours, and widespread close-downs. A stable virtual conference is significant for staying connected, especially for those in the healthcare sector.

Zoom users have shared how telemedicine worked critically during the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition, healthcare professionals worldwide have been using video technologies similar to our service to conduct online consultations, remotely diagnose patients, and provide treatment for routine checkups.

Telehealth services can be an efficient, effective care mechanism in times of great public need and simplify routine checkups, prescription refills, and general care as hospitals prioritize resources and treatment.

Virtual services were already becoming a necessary component in delivering healthcare. It helps doctors, nurses, patients, administrators, insurance companies, and others contact real-time and get access to healthcare.