Last week, BlueJeans Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Krish Ramakrishnan had the opportunity to speak on a PaleyIMPACT 2020 panel about the evolving technology used in the fight against COVID-19, including Telehealth, and how BlueJeans is working closely with customers in the healthcare sector to specialize our platform to meet the industry’s rigorous guidelines and patient needs.

Hosted by Diane Lewis, Chief Programming Officer and Executive Vice President at The Paley Center for Media, and moderated by New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, the “Health Tech in the Age of COVID-19” panel broadcasted using the BlueJeans Events live streaming platform brought together leading public officials and medical experts for an engaging conversation that bounced around between the synergy of the media and healthcare systems in promoting messages of personal responsibility, the importance of news coverage that is local and relevant regarding the pandemic, how technology tools previously disregarded for their dissociative qualities are now essential to many functions and the uphill battle of misinformation, conspiracy theories and politicized opinions that are often spread online, among others.

Panel Participants:

  • Krish Ramakrishnan, Cofounder & Chief Strategy Officer, BlueJeans By Verizon
  • Dr. Susan R. Bailey, President, American Medical Association
  • Dr. Mujeeb Basit, Cardiologist & Associate Director, Clinical Informatics Center, UT Southwestern
  • Beth Blauer, Executive Director & Founder, Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University
  • Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox News Contributor / Clinical Professor of Medicine, New York University School of Medicine / Medical Director of Doctor Radio, NYU and SiriusXM
  • Dr. John Torres, Senior Medical Correspondent, NBC News & MSNBC

From a technology standpoint, Krish emphasized the role technology has played in helping to both disseminate and localize the news surrounding the pandemic, the fact that medical information is becoming democratized, and the notion that telemedicine will become as commonplace as the ATM in the post-COVID world.

Beth Blauer explained Johns Hopkins' revolutionary COVID information dashboard, which began through a student from Wuhan wanting to track the disease’s progress in his hometown, ‘double-edged sword’ of rapidly changing information that is being disseminated to the public without thorough reviews or contexts and the problem of armchair epidemiologists—those who don't always wait for experts' input before acting on and spreading complex information.

Dr. Susan R. Bailey touched on how the Telehealth industry has matured 10 years in a period of about 10 weeks, including how her own practice switched over to telemedicine from “0 to 100 percent almost overnight.” In this next phase of Telehealth, we’ll need to make sure patient data remains safe and that physicians are able to get reimbursed appropriately for doing telemedicine practices.

Dr. Mujeeb Basit discussed how understanding the data architecture and flow of information has been essential to his work at UT Southwestern Medical and the importance of getting real-time data to conduct forecasting around COVID-19 surges and hospitalizations.

Dr. John Torres talked about how one of his jobs in working with the media is to get the information out as accurately and concise as possible with the understanding that “one of the things we’re seeing right now is the media are hearing about non peer-reviewed studies coming out.” The need to balance getting up-to-date information out to the public about the disease with how quickly this information is changing can be challenging.

Dr. Marc Siegel related COVID-19 to the Spanish Flu of 1918 in that “it’s way more than a health scare, it’s a pandemic we haven’t seen the likes of in this era” and the need to talk about it in relevant ways versus to succumbing to the fear and emotions that want us to have answers immediately.

For more insights and soundbites from the panel, visit the Paley Center's YouTube Channel for the full recording. For more information on BlueJeans for Healthcare, visit https://www.bluejeans.com/healthcare and test our your free trial of BlueJeans today.