Frequently Asked Questions

The Basics

VideoConsults by HealthOcta is a secure, HIPAA-compliant platform that solves a critical bottleneck in healthcare: timely access to subspecialist expertise in settings where it typically doesn't exist. Designed for frontline environments like emergency rooms, urgent care clinics, assisted living facilities, ACOs, and rural hospitals, the platform integrates portable diagnostic tools with real-time remote collaboration. Local clinical staff—using devices that require minimal training—can capture images and vitals, which are immediately routed to offsite subspecialists for review.

The value is speed, precision, and reach. A patient presenting with a complex condition no longer has to be transferred just because the right expert isn't in the building. Instead, a cardiologist, neurologist, or ophthalmologist can weigh in from hundreds of miles away—often within minutes. That input helps frontline teams make faster, more accurate decisions, reducing delays and improving outcomes without burdening the facility with additional onsite staff.

VideoConsults extends the diagnostic and decision-making power of small or under-resourced settings by acting as the connective tissue between frontline care and a broader network of expertise. In a healthcare system strained by staffing shortages and logistical friction, it’s a practical way to scale high-quality care across geography, infrastructure, and time.

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Yes. VideoConsults is fully HIPAA-compliant with encrypted video, secure data storage, and strict access controls, ensuring patient privacy and meeting all healthcare compliance standards.

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Yes, By leveraging the VideoConsults platform, a large hospital can function as a telemedicine hub, providing specialty consults to regional hospitals, urgent care centers, and micro-hospitals within its network. Each participating facility holds a platform license, allowing doctors across sites to collaborate seamlessly. This approach reduces unnecessary patient transfers, ensures timely access to specialty expertise, and elevates the overall quality of care across the system.

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Yes, VideoConsults allows assisted living, skilled nursing, and long-term care facilities to access on-demand specialty care for their residents without requiring transfers to hospitals or clinics. The platform connects your staff with vetted specialists who can review structured intake, diagnostics, and imaging remotely, enabling timely clinical decisions. This reduces unnecessary transfers, minimizes disruption for residents, and helps your facility deliver higher-quality care efficiently.

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Yes, VideoConsults can cover a wide range of specialties relevant to residents in LTCs, ALFs, and SNFs, including cardiology, dermatology, pulmonology, infectious disease, ophthalmology, neurology, and more. The platform gives your facility access to vetted specialists and can also integrate your own on-staff or affiliated providers, ensuring timely, high-quality consults across multiple areas of care.

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Yes, VideoConsults helps reduce unnecessary hospital transfers by enabling specialists to assess residents remotely. With structured intake, integrated diagnostics, and real-time or asynchronous consults, your staff can get expert guidance on managing complex cases in-house. This approach maintains high-quality care, improves resident comfort, and lowers costs associated with transportation and hospital admissions.

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Yes, VideoConsults allows consults to be conducted asynchronously when appropriate, enabling staff and providers at assisted living facilities (ALFs), skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), long-term care facilities (LTCs), and other care settings to manage their time more effectively. Specialists can review structured intake, diagnostics, and imaging at their convenience, providing guidance without requiring real-time coordination. This flexibility helps facilities deliver timely, high-quality care while optimizing staff and specialist workflows.

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Yes, VideoConsults allows facilities, including ALFs, SNFs, LTCs, and other care settings, to route consults either to specialists within their own organization or to an external network of vetted specialists. This flexibility ensures that residents receive timely, appropriate care, whether the expertise is available in-house or needs to be accessed remotely, while maintaining high clinical quality and operational efficiency.

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For Institutions

The response time for urgent or emergent consults depends on the contract and service level agreement your organization sets up. VideoConsults is designed to support flexible, multi-tiered workflows that can be tailored to your needs, ensuring prompt specialty coverage while optimizing costs and resource utilization.

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VideoConsults can cover a broad range of specialties, including those needed for on-call and trauma-level requirements. Our platform supports sub-specialties such as cardiology, neurology, infectious disease, pulmonology, dermatology, ophthalmology, and more. Hospitals can use our vetted specialists or integrate their own in-house or affiliated providers. This allows hospitals to meet certification standards and ensure 24×7 coverage while leveraging both on-demand and on-call consult models.

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VideoConsults ensures all tele-consults are secure, structured, and documented. Specialist providers are covered under their existing malpractice policy, which typically extends to tele-consults and provider-to-provider advice. VideoConsults ensures all consults are documented, secure, and compliant to support that coverage.

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VideoConsults secures all patient data and consult records using industry-standard encryption both in transit and at rest. Access to the platform is controlled through secure logins and role-based permissions, ensuring that only authorized providers and hospital staff can view sensitive information. All consult documentation, diagnostic data, and imaging are stored within a HIPAA-compliant environment, providing audit trails and maintaining privacy while supporting seamless clinical workflows.

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VideoConsults vets all specialists before they join the platform, verifying licensure, board certifications, and training. However, each hospital is responsible for credentialing the specialists before they can provide consults for that hospital. This ensures that hospitals maintain control over quality and compliance while still benefiting from the vetted pool of providers on the platform.

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Yes, VideoConsults provides services to track consult outcomes and measure effectiveness. Hospitals can access analytics on consult data, including turnaround times, case volumes, specialty utilization, and clinical outcomes. This allows hospitals to monitor quality, identify areas for improvement, and demonstrate the value of the platform in enhancing patient care and operational efficiency.

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Some specialties, such as ophthalmology, dermatology, and cardiology, require specialized clinical-grade smart devices to capture the necessary diagnostic data. HealthOcta has integrations with best-of-breed device manufacturers, and as part of a VideoConsults subscription, healthcare organizations can lease these devices directly through HealthOcta. Many other specialties do not require specialized devices; in those cases, simply subscribing to the service line and having credentialed specialists on the platform is sufficient to start providing consults.

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Devices that you procure as part of your subscription come with an advanced replacement technical support contract. The VideoConsults platform itself includes access to a customer support helpline for general assistance. In addition, premium and advanced technical support options are available for organizations that need faster response times or more hands-on support.

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HealthOcta has relationships with specialist groups that provide their services on the VideoConsults platform. In addition, hospitals are welcome to subscribe to a service line and have us set up the platform to route consults to specialists they already have on staff or to specialist groups with whom they have pre-existing relationships. This ensures flexibility while leveraging the platform’s workflow, structured intake, and integrated diagnostics.

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VideoConsults provides flexible scheduling tools that allow hospitals to manage consults across multiple specialists and locations. The platform can be configured to match your hospital’s workflows, whether for on-demand coverage, scheduled consults, or multi-tiered on-call arrangements. Requests can be routed according to availability, specialty, and location, ensuring timely responses while optimizing specialist utilization. This centralized scheduling system helps hospitals coordinate coverage efficiently across their network without creating extra administrative burden.

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Yes, VideoConsults is designed to scale across multiple hospitals, care facilities, and service lines. The platform can manage consults, specialists, and devices across locations, allowing centralized oversight while maintaining flexibility for each facility. This ensures consistent workflows, standardized intake, and efficient specialty coverage across an entire health system.

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Yes, VideoConsults can integrate with your existing EMR or other hospital IT systems. Integration is part of our customization services and is billed separately. All consult notes are audit-logged within our system and can be downloaded by your staff, then easily added to the EHR to document the interaction.

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Yes, VideoConsults allows hospitals to standardize consult intake forms across departments and service lines. The platform supports structured intake templates that can be customized for each specialty, ensuring that specialists receive consistent, complete, and relevant information for every consult. This standardization improves clinical efficiency, reduces errors, and helps maintain high-quality care across all locations and service lines.

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Yes, VideoConsults is highly configurable and allows hospitals to set preferences for asynchronous or synchronous consults based on specialty, clinical urgency, or workflow needs. This flexibility ensures that each service line can operate in the most efficient and effective way for both providers and patients.

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How does it help?

VideoConsults can help you expand your specialty practice by giving you access to patients and hospitals beyond your immediate geography, without needing to open satellite clinics. The VideoConsults platform connects you with hospitals, ERs, urgent cares, and patients who lack access to your subspecialty, creating new referral streams. By Being associated with HealthOcta's platforms, you can generate additional revenue both from direct patient consults, such as second opinions or follow-ups through eClinics by HealthOcta and from professional-to-professional consults using VideoConsults when other physicians and institutions need your expertise.

eClinics by HealthOcta also improves practice efficiency by letting you manage routine visits or lower-acuity cases virtually, freeing up your in-person clinic for higher-value care. Over time, being listed on the HealthOcta platform builds your visibility and reputation nationally, positioning you as a go-to specialist while future-proofing your practice as healthcare shifts toward hybrid and tele-enabled models.

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