How big is the opportunity?

I would say it’s the opportunity of let’s say online retail and how dramatic that change was for the retail industry. It’s a watershed event. It continues to morph in front of our eyes with more technology, with more penetration, with more mobile broadband, with the production of different payment methods.  This is one of those technologies thatlife will never be the same once it’s out. This is pretty much where the inflection of telehealth is.

What are the challenges remaining to get to the point that you imagine?

I think a lot of people in this industry still don’t know how this technology works and what it can do. That’s true about providers, and it’s true about patients, and it’s true about payers and the government. Now growth – that is becoming less of an issue. I can tell you that three years ago, four years ago, carrying the flag of telehealth – it felt like being a missionary. Today, carrying the flag of telehealth is ‘you’re the person everyone wants to talk to. So it’s a very, very significant shift in terms of the number of people who want to do this. Just like at the dawn of online retail, people were very skeptical about punching in their credit cards. They were concerned about it, and I think that has largely gone away. We are metaphorically at the same step where people are extremely curious. They kind of know that it’s going to work, and they are king of tipping their toes into it. But the thing is that they are. We know that the use cases are very sound. We know that the infrastructure in terms of security and confidentiality and appropriateness and quality of care is there.

What, in your view, would be the best scenario for the future of telehealth?

I know it sounds a little bit non-traditional to think of healthcare industry as a service industry. We hear it left and right. At the end of the day, healthcare is going to be a better industry if patients are going to begin be aware and be accountable for how their health is – whether it’s stop eating the wrong thing, begin to exercise, follow up and do preventive tests, that’s going to change the needle of healthcare altogether. I think what that does, it puts the focus on the consumers of the service, essentially the patients. And, if you ask me about what’s the end game? The visible, gratifying end game for telehealth is getting to the point that live healthcare becomes part of your medicine cabinet at home. If that is how you use telehealth as a consumer, it becomes a no-brainer. You know that healthcare is available to you. You can from home engage it when you need it as you need it, irrespective of where you live and irrespective of time of day or coverage. If live healthcare and live healthcare professionals are part of your medicine cabinet that’s one of the mental transformational endpoints of what telehealth is trying to do. That is our mission as a company, but also as an industry to do just that.