We’ve written about telehealth and telemedicine numerous times. Most examples of telemedicine we cover involve a subset of patients, businesses, or regions. For example, in 2018, we wrote about Penn Medicine’s Brain Tumor Center’s telemedicine second opinion program for brain tumors. We covered a study that evaluated telemedicine support for post-surgical kidney transplant recipients by researchers at the  Department of Nephrology at Odense University Hospital in Denmark. We also wrote about AristaMD’s eConsult platform PCPs can use to consult with specialists.

Nye Health is a UK startup nurtured by the Oxford Foundry business venture group at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. In 2018 Nye Health began developing Nye, a voice and video call platform for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). The platform was taking shape and available to a 200,000 patient NHS patient subset when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In response to the coronavirus threat, the NHS as rolled out Nye Health’s platform to all of its patients. So far, more than 10 million patients now use the software.

All NHS clinicians and staff can use Nye, including general practitioner’s offices, hospitals, hospices, and community services groups. Healthcare professionals who use Nye can also use their personal devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers, to have phone calls or video calls with patients. Many patients and healthcare professionals would rather avoid the risk of in-person meetings when possible. Nye’s device-agnostic program enables clinicians to protect their personal contact information use while using their private devices to connect with patients. The service is NHS-compliant, and holds NHS GPSoC (GP Systems of Choice) and DSPT IG (Data Security and Protection Toolkit) certifications, according to Nye.

The Nye platform has scaled telemedicine to full system-wide implementation on a faster schedule than originally intended, but this seems like a case of the tools being ready just as they were needed.