What is Telehealth or Virtual Healthcare?

Telehealth is the distribution of health-related services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies. It allows long-distance patient and clinician contact, care, advice, reminders, education, intervention, monitoring, and remote admissions. - Wikipedia

In summary, Telehealth or Virtual healthcare allows you to get health consultation through video calls or the phone. This is vital during this time where physical distancing is needed to ensure everyone's safety.

You are scheduled with your Primary Care Practitioner or Specialists’ Office for your routine visit. You had your blood taken a few weeks ago. You kept a concise journal of any questions or concerns you have noticed since the last visit. You even went so far as to make sure you and your background look good for this. You put the pets out of the room and the kids and spouse too, whew! You are now ready for your closeup! It’s simple, who hasn’t been live streaming these days, right? Let’s hope you have a productive healthcare visit with your Nurse Practitioner or Medical Doctor and one that uses all of your time wisely. Interruptions over live streams or online health consultation can be counterproductive.

Here are the common issues Internet accesses have when streaming online health consultation.

Platform issues. Your medical professional may prefer different streaming platform. It can be Facebook Live, Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype, etc. Just to be sure that there aren’t any issues with the platform you’re trying to stream video from – check their status page or support social media pages. They should be up and running If it’s not them, then it’s definitely you.

ISP throttling. A lot of times ISPs or Internet service providers will throttle your bandwidth for video streaming, to conserve it across the network.

Slow internet from your ISP. Also – you should test the speed of your Internet connection. Is your Internet bandwidth fast enough, within these recommendations: at least 5 Mbps for a HD quality video / 25 Mbps for an Ultra HD video?

Unstable internet from your ISP. When you test your speed, check out the lag and jitter numbers: the lower, the better.

Every streaming platform offers a connection troubleshooting guide on their website. We recommend you try that first. If it doesn’t help, make sure you try the steps below when it comes to issues related to your Internet connectivity:

1. Reboot your device and router. Sometimes that’s all you need to do.
2. Move closer to the wireless router. Or even better, use a wired connection, if available.
3. Close any background programs that might be using bandwidth on your device. These include backup programs, social networks, collaboration tools, torrenting applications etc.
4. Check to see if there are any other devices on your network using bandwidth. Maybe your kids are streaming something themselves. Or playing games online.
5. If your ISP is throttling you, use a fast VPN. As streaming traffic goes through the encrypted tunnel, they won’t be able to detect it and throttle it.
6. If you have a second Internet connection available (e.g. public WiFi, mobile data, backup connection), why not use that as well? Use the extra connection along with your home Internet simultaneously on your device for faster, more stable Internet. All you need is a channel bonding service like Speedify.

As a fast bonding VPN, Speedify allows you to combine multiple Internet connections at once. This happens through a VPN-grade encrypted tunnel, so your privacy and data security is protected.

If one of the connections you’re using becomes slower or even disconnects, Speedify will automatically start moving traffic to the other working connection(s). When the first connection is back, it starts using it again.

And don’t worry – just because it’s a VPN that doesn’t mean you can’t access your favorite streaming platforms. Speedify’s bypass feature allows only trusted traffic from Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Disney+ and more to go around the VPN tunnel (keep in mind that these services will not be taking advantage of the bonded connection in terms of speed).

We hope to have answered your question on about telehealth or virtual healthcare and how you can improve your overall internet connection. You can now try Speedify for free.