How Zoom is expanding its role in healthcare

Zoom, a company that rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, is looking to expand its presence in healthcare through artificial intelligence. 

The company recently announced plans to incorporate ambient AI documentation technology from digital health company Suki in its clinical platform. Zoom plans to use the ambient AI technology, which turns a recording of a doctor-patient conversation into usable clinical notes in the electronic health record, for virtual and in-person visits. 

Related: Where health systems are heading with AI 

It's the latest move in healthcare from the video teleconferencing company, which has offered telehealth services since 2018.

Here's a closer look at Zoom's history in healthcare and where it plans to go next.

What has Zoom done in healthcare so far?

Zoom's platform took off when the company integrated with EHR vendor Epic in 2019. The integration allowed all healthcare providers who used Epic to conduct telehealth patient visits on Zoom through the EHR vendor.  

It later partnered with other major EHR vendors including Cerner, Meditech and Veradigm between 2021 and 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic also played a role in the company's emergence in healthcare as the need for telehealth among clinicians skyrocketed overnight. Zoom became one of the most commonly used telehealth platforms among healthcare providers in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a January 2021 report from market research company KLAS Research.   

Who are Zoom's competitors in healthcare?

As demand for digital healthcare increases among providers, Zoom is in a crowded field of virtual care competitors including Teladoc, Amwell and eVisit. 

The company has the top market share—nearly 36%—among all telehealth vendors, according to a report from market research and analytics company Definitive Healthcare in January.  

What is new with Zoom in healthcare?

Recently, Zoom has shifted its sights on partnerships outside of the EHR vendor realm. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in an August earnings call that mental health startup Lyra Health has fully integrated the telehealth company's meeting and video features on its website and apps. Yuan also touted a partnership with Bayada Home Health Care in a May earnings call. 

In addition to its partnerships with Lyra, Bayada and Suki, the company is launching three new platforms for healthcare organizations and providers within the next year, said Heidi West, head of healthcare for Zoom. 

Zoom's Workplace for Healthcare platform will focus on using AI to simplify administrative tasks between employees at a healthcare organization. Zoom Workplace for Clinicians includes Suki's AI documentation and will use AI to summarize patient visits. The company has also developed a healthcare-specific update to its base translation and transcription service, which will simplify medical lingo for patients that organizations can add onto their Zoom packages, West said. 

"One of the things we got as feedback from our clients is that there are a lot of people talking in healthcare that aren't necessarily needing to transcribe a patient [encounter], but there's still medical speak going on," West said. "Two doctors talking to each other are going to use medical terms, and do we even know what a hematoma is [in] normal translation? Probably not." 

What are the challenges Zoom faces?

One challenge facing the company is a lack of consensus on telehealth reimbursement for providers, West said. COVID-19 pandemic era waivers that extended telehealth reimbursement flexibilities expire Dec. 31 without congressional action. In absence of federal rules, each state has its own set of reimbursement rules. 

With no clear consensus in the industry on how telehealth services should be reimbursed, demand for these services can vary regionally and among providers, West said.  

Where does Zoom stand on patient privacy? 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Office for Civil Rights temporarily eased enforcement of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act violations by allowing providers to use telehealth services with their patients using non-public-facing communications applications. While this flexibility may have affected the free version of Zoom, its healthcare platforms have been fully compliant since it started getting into telehealth prior to COVID-19, West said.

West also said that any patient information is stored by the EHR company not by Zoom itself.

"Like the partnership we just announced with Suki, they would have the patient information," West said. "We still have a [business associate agreement] and all the responsibility and safeguards around patient health information, but our focus and our goal in all of this is to be the communication and collaboration engine that drives healthcare and supports healthcare."