Weemo and TrueVault, a provider of regulatory compliant storage for Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII), are partnering to deliver a HIPAA-compliant video cloud platform, powering telehealth apps with WebRTC.
The idea is not new – we’ve talked about the benefits of using WebRTC in telemedicine applications before, as well as HIPAA considerations when working with patient data. Weemo has experience in the healthcare industry, using its WebRTC platform to power MediSprout, a provider of a HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform to enable communication between healthcare providers and patients.
Damien Espinasse, marketing manager at Weemo, explained that MediSprout is a SaaS solution used by healthcare professionals to communicate with their patients. The solution is built on top of Weemo’s video cloud platform, which powers real-time video capabilities.
As of today, telehealth solution providers such as MediSprout have two options to add video to their service:
- They decide to do it in-house
- They decide to rely on a third-party "video platform"
“In both cases, they need to be HIPAA compliant,” Espinasse explained. “Today, a lot of the providers that choose the second option rely on the Vidyo platform, which is HIPAA compliant. However, Vidyo is not a cloud platform. Telehealth providers need to buy, install and manage hardware to run real-time video with Vidyo. This reduces providers' ability to deliver video for doctor-to-patients type of use cases. The use of video is then mainly restricted to video between healthcare providers.”
For the above reason and because it is easier to use and more cost-effective, providers may prefer to rely on a cloud platform. However, those are not HIPAA-compliant in a scenario where the providers want to be able to record and playback video consultations (which is a best practice), he said.
As a result, with the TrueVault partnership, “Weemo is the only option for telehealth providers that want to rely on a cloud platform to add real-time video with the recording capabilities. We deliver both the real-time video and the recording pieces in a HIPAA-compliant manner,” Espinasse said.
With just a few lines of code, companies can embed video chat and conferencing into applications with Weemo’s WebRTC platform. It partners with companies like eXO, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Zimbra and Tata Communications to offer reliability, features and real-time access. Using technologies like JavaScript and WebRTC, Weemo enables Web developers and service providers to implement and integrate real-time communications.
“WebRTC is a game changer for the telehealth market and many developers are looking to leverage this new technology. With this new offering, videoconferencing is no more restricted to internal collaboration between members of the medical staff. Telemedicine now allows live interactions between patients and physicians,” said Thomas Cottereau, CEO of Weemo, in a statement.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
