The company has onboarded more than 100 practices onto its TriMed for Pediatrics platform, which provides online booking, charting and access to medical records in real-time as pediatricians teleconference with patients.
- Member name: Tim Martin, CEO of TriMed Tech
- Location: High Point, North Carolina
- Industry: Healthcare Technology
- Vistage Chair: Niels Lameijer
Since launching in 1996, the High Point, North Carolina-based TriMed Tech has been seen as a novel idea — using teleconference technology to connect doctors with patients remotely.
"The real challenge in the marketplace was the need for it," TriMed Tech CEO Tim Martin told WGHP-TV in Greensboro. "We've had it built into our products for a while, but we just could not get a lot of physicians who wanted to do it just because it's a tough transition and patients didn't see the need for it."
Fast-forward to 2020, where smartphones and high-speed Internet access are now commonplace, giving telehealth the necessary infrastructure to succeed. Then throw in that need: A pandemic like COVID-19 that requires people keep a safe distance from one another.
Now, medical professionals clamor for TriMed Tech. Martin says since the pandemic began the company has onboarded more than 100 practices onto its TriMed for Pediatrics platform, which provides online booking, charting and access to medical records in real-time as pediatricians teleconference with patients. Recently, the platform hit 80,000 virtual office visits.
"The thought was hard to imagine, even a few years ago," Martin told WGHP-TV.
TriMed Tech may be an idea whose time has come. A recent study from New York-based market research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts the telehealth industry will see a sevenfold increase in growth between now and 2025. Due in large part to COVID-19, the study reports the industry will soar as medical professionals push for advancements in technologies that can help treat patients remotely without the fear of exposing them to disease.
While those technologies, including more user-friendly sensors and remote diagnostic equipment, still need to be developed, Martin has the foundation for that growth — medical teleconferencing platforms — primed and ready.
"The main value that we saw for telehealth before all of this was convenience," he told WGHP-TV. "What has obviously shown itself in the COVID outbreak is that there is a major value for treating infectious diseases or a highly-contagious virus, to keep a person who is a Type-2 diabetic who may be over 65 or 70 years old [away]. You don't want them to have to come to the office, but you want them to be able to get their prescription refilled. Telemedicine has been a great opportunity for something like that."
