Samsung Products May Soon Offer Telehealth

Last week, famed consumer electronics and digital technology leader, Samsung, announced a new partnership with IntelliTek Health, a company that has developed a patient centered virtual assistant tool.

The partnership’s goal is to use AI technology and digital voice assistance to enable healthcare providers to deploy their services through Samsung products. IntelliTek Health’s “Personal Virtual Assistant” (PVA) platform is its propriety product which supports robust care delivery.

Martyn Molnar, Global Healthcare Lead and Products CEO of IntelliTek Health, explains: “The PVA is the leading technology to address post-discharge care for providers and patients. Every year, approximately 36 million discharges occur across the US healthcare system, with the majority of patients left alone to handle their care journey post-discharge […] Our collaboration with Samsung will help us address the significant health inequity in this space with Samsung Mobile Solutions and connectivity that offer simple, personalized medical communication and instruction between Patients and their Care teams in the critical window after leaving the hospital.”

Samsung is not new to the healthcare scene. The company has its own revolutionary suite of healthcare products, especially known for its cutting edge work in imaging and diagnostics. Furthermore, the company also has a renowned medical center in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, which provides key services to the community and is a large part of the local healthcare infrastructure.

Many of its technological ventures in healthcare are inspired by the problems the company sees first hand through its own patient’s care journeys. Trevor Smith, Head of Business Development at Samsung Healthcare, commented: “Samsung’s collaboration with IntelliTek Health reinforces our continued commitment to providing accurate Digital Touchpoint solutions, to support innovation in the Remote Patient Care Coordination segment. Our combined expertise and resources will allow us to develop meaningful solutions to advance patient outcomes, improve clinical workflows, and enable more efficient cost-effective Care.”

In the right context and with time, Samsung may soon be able to deploy the PVA across its device ecosystem, including its line of highly advanced televisions, which are currently among the best selling TVs in the United States. This could potentially unlock an entirely new level of customer access and reach.

Ultimately, healthcare-at-home solutions have been at the forefront of attention and investment in recent years. In terms of pure convenience, offering healthcare in the comfort of a patient’s home has been viewed as an incredibly worthwhile endeavor, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic.

In addition, this novel venture into healthcare delivery may address important access-to-care issues. Enabling patients to connect with physicians shortly after being discharged to home may provide a medium by which they can stay in close touch with their care teams, and thereby have their symptoms and post-discharge condition closely monitored.

In this way, important partnerships like these solve a very real continuity-of-care problem: healthcare no longer has to end as soon as the patient leaves the hospital, but can entail an ecosystem which is conducive for persistent touch-points and progress checks.

Indeed, this partnership and the many other technological ventures that are ongoing to empower remote healthcare solutions and healthcare-at-home services may define the future of healthcare delivery: one that moves away from seeing healthcare as tied down to a physical location, to instead, creating an ecosystem that follows the patient.