No patient left behind: Telehealth aids under-served communities

How Luma Health provides an all-in-one solution that reaches people where they are.

Luma Health, the healthcare patient engagement platform, recently saw a 37x messaging growth at the start of the COVID-19 spread in the United States. A mobile-first patient communication startup, Luma is also a Cisco Investments portfolio company that seeks to provide healthcare in the most accessible way. So when the pandemic began to expand, Luma knew its capabilities also had to grow. To better serve the need during this time, Luma and its team created a new telehealth solution in under three weeks that makes video visits simple for patients — particularly for smaller clinics and under-served populations.

One-click healthcare

Within the previous six to eight weeks of the global crisis, Luma saw patient messaging skyrocket. Needs for mass messaging, rescheduling, and education ramped up significantly as well.

“It’s been such a moving target,” says Luma Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tashfeen Ekram, “Our clinics needed a way to be able to exchange information with their patients, whether that included scheduling issues, mass messaging their patients, or educating them about current information and health best practices.”

Built on top of the cloud, Ekram says that scaling up its messaging wasn’t too difficult of a task. But he and the team knew there needed to be a simple, virtual telehealth solution as well. At the end of March, the company launched Luma Health Telehealth, a solution that enables one-click, HIPAA compliant virtual appointments between doctors and patients, and can be integrated within a clinic’s Electronic Health Record system.

While adequate and accessible healthcare is a priority for many, often telehealth solutions can be too complicated to use or cannot be integrated within a clinic’s existing system. Luma Health Telehealth uses the same philosophy as with its messaging — it doesn’t require an app, login, or portal, making it simple for patients to use. One click of a link takes users to a web browser on their phone or desktop.

“This has allowed clinics to be able to mass message, identify patients who are at-risk, schedule appointments, and give them access to care,” says Ekram, “Clinics will be able to control the whole process. Our solution can take a clinic and help them to become completely virtual, digitizing the entire healthcare delivery process from beginning to end. I think it’s been helpful for a lot of our clients in this transition phase of going from in-person visits to completely digital.”

Read more about Luma Health over at The Network.