OroHealth
A Pioneer in Asynchronous Telemedicine Solutions

The pandemic has made virtual consultations the new standard in the healthcare industry, with over 50 percent of patients opting for virtual visits. This is typically conducted via phone or video conferencing, a comfortable but dated approach, limiting the use of newer technologies and modalities for improved convenience. That’s why the healthcare industry is looking to embrace an omnichannel strategy to enhance provider capacity and enable a robust virtual care model. Showing great promise in this regard is asynchronous telehealth, often termed as the next big thing in consumer-oriented telemedicine. Asynchronous platforms provide a viable alternative to videobased care and offer seamless staffing allocation along with easy workflow configuration, proving to be more cost-effective and efficient.

Pioneering this shift in the field of teledermatology is OroHealth. The company is one of the leading solution providers in specialized telemedicine and virtual care, offering a oneof- a-kind, AI-powered, white-labeled platform. “What started as an MVP venture for two dermatologists soon took shape into one of the most renowned asynchronous teledermatology product. By 2020, we saw several dermatologists utilizing the Oro platform, which enabled 17,000 Canadian patients to obtain accurate diagnosis from a certified dermatologist for minor skin conditions in just a few hours, without the need for prior referral from a general practitioner,” states Jean- Phillipe Dore, the Co-founder and CRO, OroHealth.

OroHealth’s core philosophy is based on the store-and-forward model that offers more freedom to patients and doctors and drives greater efficiency in the clinical cycle. This allows physicians to consult at least twice the number of patients as opposed to a regular telehealth program. In essence, the Oro platform supports a direct patient dermatology clinic catering to more than a thousand patients a month. It has achieved 12 percent patient intake growth, month after month, without diminishing its quality and output.

With the Oro platform, patients can also access curated educational content about the efficiency of OroHealth’s service, helping them make informed decisions around consultations. After they sign up for the consult, they follow the triage flow, a dynamic questionnaire that will provide standardized answers for a doctor. Patients can then submit pictures to the doctors for consultation. Based on this information, doctors offer a diagnosis synopsis with a clear treatment plan sent asynchronously to the patient file, giving patients a choice to accept or reject it. If they accept the treatment, the script is automatically sent to the pharmacy onsite. This allows patients to go through their entire care journey from their homes while doctors are equipped with the necessary tools for closing a case within a couple of minutes. The Oro platform can significantly reduce the regular wait times of more than 90 days to see a specialist to less than 24 hours.“We have optimized the continuum of care by bringing this model to various specialties and scaling them. We ensure that the patient intake and the backoffice operations on the doctor’s side run smoothly,” adds Dore.“We have optimized the continuum of care by bringing this model to various specialties and scaling them. We ensure that the patient intake and the backoffice operations on the doctor’s side run smoothly,” adds Dore.

One of the major concerns for patients, doctors, and general practitioners is the security and privacy of medical data. Even though several end-to-end encryption technologies exist, healthcare systems still require a trusted third party to recover an account or configure the encrypted systems.

As compared to this, the Oro platform leverages end-to-end encryption in a way that allows only the doctor and patient to access the medical data using proprietary patent-pending vault technology. It is a pure version of end-to-end encryption where only those within the ‘circle of trust’ can decrypt and assist individuals in managing, displaying, and utilizing medical information. The company also offers OroSmart, a computer vision and ML-based decision-making tool built to assist doctors in handling more cases efficiently.

Our ultimate business goal is to become an orchestrator or a central point of care. We would like to expand our offering to connected devices and focus more on remote patient monitoring to start building proactive healthcare instead of reactive healthcare

OroHealth’s team always relies on the expertise of its trusted party, the doctors, to decipher the best ways to leverage the data science and ML tools. “By leveraging our tool, doctors become more confident about their own diagnostic and treatment choices. The tooling is meant to amplify and supplement the doctor so that they are more efficient and precise,” mentions Bruno Morel, the CTO, OroHealth. While supporting doctors with swift diagnosis, OroHealth’s tools are also designed to ensure the complete safety of patient data by preventing any personnel outside the circle of trust from accessing their images or medical details. The dataset containing the real patient images, even though they are anonymized, are not allowed to be viewed by data scientists. If they want to understand the data and the pattern, we have a process that involves our trusted party, the doctor, to approve or refine and change the approach for viewing an image. This is how we ensure the privacy of sensitive patient information,” adds Morel.

In 2020, OroHealth closed a seed financing, the proceeds of which are being used to scale other practices. It has launched a virtual STD clinic and will continue to grow its existing practices outside the country, launching Dermago UK and Dermago Dubai in the first quarter of 2022. The company is also striving to meet the global compliance needs to support the growth and scale of all the clinics outside Canada. It will interface with other technologies such as eSigning and ePrescription systems to become a truly digital solution. OroHealth’s vision is to integrate with several smart devices to offer a holistic solution to doctors to foster better care for patients. It is currently building a network of specialist practitioners on the platform. “Our ultimate business goal is to expand our offering and start building proactive healthcare instead of reactive healthcare,” concludes Dore.