Telemedicine Verification

Telemedicine, also referred to as telehealth, is any form of digitized healthcare service offered to patients online. 

Examples of telemedicine and its services include:

• Video calls with a healthcare service provider.
• Pharmaceutical item subscriptions via a remote platform.
• Mental health apps with monitoring tools that share symptoms with a doctor.

The main goal of this industry is to create a digital solution for patients to communicate with their doctors remotely, aka without being in the same location, such as a physical hospital, pharmacy, etc. 

Telemedicine is a field where sensitive data is stored, which makes it an attractive industry for data breaches. Since virtual healthcare services lack face-to-face interactions (unlike traditional care), stricter security measures, such as ID verification, need to be used. 

Key reasons why identity verification measures need to be applied in telemedicine include:

• For protecting sensitive health data, preventing fraud, and ensuring safe patient care.
• For ensuring regulatory compliance, such as KYC laws, as well as other regulations like HIPAA. 

Stolen personal files of health records can be used for ransomware attacks. A similar principle can be applied to senior citizens, who might not even notice that their data was breached and used for financial fraud. For example, fraudsters can use stolen information to create synthetic identities and open bank accounts or apply for credit cards in their name, often without the victim noticing until much later.

A proper telemedicine verification solution should be fully automated, offering a swift and accurate onboarding process that verifies patients and doctors, allowing them to access the remote healthcare infrastructure while also complying with KYC regulations in their operating countries. If multiple markets are covered, the verification software should be global, offering the verification experience in the user’s native language and supporting a large ID document base. Otherwise, patients’ IDs won’t be recognized.