>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this CUBE conversation. Of course during the COVID-19 pandemic, lots of businesses and industries have been upended. One area where there's been real acceleration of the use of online technology, of course, has been telehealth and telemedicine. To help us look into what is happening in that space. We have Eric Gray, he is the chief Solutions Architect with NetScout. Eric, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks to you, it's great to be here. >> All right, so as I teed it up, obviously, telehealth, telemedicine. I've had most of my family have done virtual visits, if you will, you know talking to doctors in the like online has been a real shift not something that is pervasive today. Help us understand a little bit how your customers are dealing with this, and the changes that are happening in their world? >> Well, it's certainly becoming a significant paradigm shift in our industry, you think over, over the history of medicine, people have been going in and seeing a doctor sitting in that waiting room and going through all of the, the permutations to spend, 10 minutes with the doctor to diagnose their symptoms. The shift that we have and driven in the fact that has been driven by a global pandemic is, maybe it's unfortunate, but at the same time, it is pushing the industry, strongly in that direction. They say that by by 2021, this is a $66 billion industry or business. So, healthcare organizations be at hospitals and clinics, local providers, anybody that's having to deal with medicine back and forth, in an interaction with their patients. He's going to make this shift over, over a very short period of time. >> In general Eric, how prepared was the typical practitioner to be able to support this kind of environment? You know, we've seen what's happened with local elementary school education, most of them aren't set up for remote as opposed to if I looked at, secondary schools, universities usually had some component of online learning. But when it comes to the medical industry, do you have any thing you can share as to, what segments of the market were ready? How many just had to scramble and say, oh, my gosh, I need this by Monday. >> So there were certainly the larger healthcare providers that I spend my time with, here in the Western US they were ready to go. They had been looking forward into this field for quite a while they had the technology in place, but not was certainly not the case for all. I've spent more time in the last three months talking to university healthcare organizations, local healthcare organizations, who weren't at all ready to roll out the technology necessary to be able to provide that doctor-patient interaction in a successful and high quality way. >> All right, well, let's let's drill in a little bit because most people think, oh, I'm going to move to an online experience. It doesn't just mean, if I was a restaurant, it doesn't just mean that, I have an app or an online, portal. If I was school, it's not just let's throw zoom at the solution. If you're talking, telehealth and telemedicine. I'm sure there's a lot that needs to be done, ahead of the any visits, obviously, heavily regulated industry. So let's walk through a free quick could the, the full landscape there. >> So the the biggest concerns that a lot of the healthcare organizations have they're trying to roll this out. Probably the biggest one by far is maintaining a level of HIPAA compliance. So that the data that's been moving back and forth between the doctor-patient is staying exactly there it's private. It's not exposed, even though it's going across public internet, in many cases, from someone's home to the the location of the physician, that that information remains confidential. Second, it really needs to be high quality, as the doctor is interacting with the patient now in his, kind of the same fashion that you and I are right now, over a webcam over their local ISP, the quality might vary. So, if a doctor is going to make an accurate assessment of a patient, and assess their symptoms without actually having them come into an office, they need to have an exceptional experience, the quality of the audio needs to be great quality, the video needs to be excellent. The entire interaction needs to be pristine. And then there's the things that wrap around that patient doctor experience, the things that give us the call it the infrastructure that makes it happen. That's the DNS connections in the underlying network, but it's also prior to the call making sure that you have the ability to set it up, access medical records, after the call, being able to get to pharmacy to get to your prescription, or see the test results that came from the experience. Even billing, I'm going to go pay my bill, I need to be able to get on, get to something reliably and have a secure transaction. All of this stuff together sort of makes up what is modern telemedicine. Though, most of the time, the telehealth experiences what's considered everything, whereas telemedicine is really looked at as the doctor patient conversation, across that new digital media. >> Yeah, what if companies had to deal with if they had really a toe or they were starting down this path and all of a sudden they need to go from something that they do as an exception to now this is what they've been doing for the last few months. How do they scale that up? >> That was a shock for many of them. Some had some, basic level of interaction capability. But I've had customers that have talked to me about a 20 to 30 x increase in the amount of bandwidth necessary and the amount of technology needed in order to facilitate these conversations. The market is skyrocketing. Doctors are you know, they're making this dramatic shift because they need to protect their patients they need to protect themselves. And as the need has gone up exponentially, IT teams are really scrambling. They're having to provide this technology very, very quickly standing up new concentrators, for VPN connections. Lots of new service provider connections, so that they have additional bandwidth capable. And then going out to the different companies who provide direct telemedicine and telehealth connectivity, so that they are maintaining, that high level of security as well. So all of this together has just created this explosion in this industry as people rush to deploy the stuff. >> It definitely sounds very challenging. I've talked to, government agencies that get emergency funding for this. What's the impact on from a financial standpoint? I think from a patient standpoint, you say, it's not like all of a sudden you're going to be able to bill more. If anything, they're like, hey, I'm not coming to the office. I'm you know, is a little bit less to go there. So what are the financial implications of all this? >> That's really interesting. So, as many healthcare companies especially the hospitals ramped up to fight COVID-19, and the coronavirus epidemic, getting access to the appropriate PPE and emergency room technology, making sure they have enough ventilators. All that stuff was a big drain on the emergency funds. When they looked at what was going on with telemedicine. It's really a dramatic savings. So the survey say that somewhere in the order of the United States healthcare industry overall. As we shift into a primarily telemedicine based system, it save up to $4 billion a year. So it's significantly less expensive for those health care companies to be able to provide this kind of interaction. Not only money, but also from a quality of the interaction as well. Now, as I said it kind of in the beginning, I know when I would go in and talk to a doctor, maybe I would get 10 minutes. There's a lot of time that you spend sitting in the waiting room, waiting in the in the actual room, and the interaction is very short, and maybe not such great quality. Now, as I've been spending a few sessions with doctors online, it's really great. I've got no waiting. I've got a longer window of time with my physician. I think it's probably, a better interaction for me and overall, it's going to save the healthcare company significant amount of money. Seems like it makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah, that's an interesting silver lining, if you will, that we can right really kind of, change it from, it was almost done. Just in time manufacturing methodology, as we've maximized the utilization of everything with all the scheduling and the like, and we're really building it more like a distributed system now. So I'm curious, Eric, what is the thinking around these people, these companies, if you're scaling this up for remote, eventually, there will be the new normal, let's say we have, you know, a vaccine and, going back to the office visits will be more prevalent. What is the thinking about, what this will look like and hybrid mode or what will the telemedicine dial back a little bit, in the next year or so? >> I think the general consensus is that it's here to stay. This isn't the first pandemic, it won't be the last and putting the proper technology in place right now, that's available. I mean, this is not something that's years in the making, it's out there. It's just that a lot of companies, weren't quite ready to take the lead, either from an investment standpoint or just doing things the same way and making that paradigm shift. I believe not only are we seeing the significant shift just in this timeframe, but it's going to be here for a long period of time. They're going to be certainly people that will want to go back to the old way of visiting the doctor. And as at home diagnostics become more, more prevalent things from like a blood pressure monitor or pulse ox monitor, various ways that you can actually take vital readings from your home and have that data transmitted into your EMR, EHR system. That makes it even more sticky. So I believe the time is going to come where we'll set up a couple of steps back, but those 10 steps that we've made forward, it's something that the industry has been waiting for for a long time. And now we're going to get there really quickly. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to think, Eric, if this had been 10 years ago, that we would be having a very different conversation. If you would take us in a little bit the learnings that you had, whereas NetScout finding that it's helping its clients the most when it comes to the telehealth and telemedicine solutions? >> Well, one of the things that's really gotten us excited at NetScout, we've been in this business of being able to secure and monitor, enterprise and service provider networks for the last 35 plus years. NetScout has been in this business to keep the customers networks alive, keep them healthy, and help them to troubleshoot problems when they occur. So as we look at applying, our technology towards this telemedicine experience, it seemed like a perfect fit for us. We can break it down in kind of three categories. First, what happens prior to the experience? We want to make sure that we can maintain a high level of availability for the the healthcare organizations network to make sure that the telehealth software is functional, that the network is robust that the response times are low. So understanding what that experience is like in advance of the call, is probably a little bit of a slam dunk. But we want to make sure that we're always ready and able to handle the load. Second is, and probably most important is during the call. Once that patient is talking to the doctor, and they're ongoing through video, audio chat, we want to make sure that, the quality of that experience is exceptional. About 10 years ago, NetScout acquired some technology that gave us the insight into how unified communication protocols function, and gave us the ability to measure my scores jitter and loss, even in a secure RTP kind of payload environment. So even with encryption, we can still give you a high understanding of how good that session is to make sure that the patient and doctor, are seeing each other, they're hearing each other and it's pristine. Then finally on the back end, what happens after the call. So once the physician and the patient are done, I still need to go see my records and the bill. As I said before, we want to make sure that all the systems that make that happen are up, functional and capable of being used every day. Our ability to monitor these sessions baseline their performance and triage in the event of an issue helps us to keep EMR systems like Epic and Cerner and McKesson up and running. The billing systems that make things happen. HL seven protocol tying everything together. Giving the patient access to their records, their medical images, et cetera. And the network that makes all this happen, probably already monitored by NetScout as our customers are very loyal and have been for many years. >> Alright, Eric, I'll give you the final word. If customers want to learn more about what you're doing in this space, what would you recommend for them? >> Well, we are very excited about what we're doing with all of these solutions for our customers. First we published a white paper that you can find it at netscout.com. We show up on a telemedicine landing page you can read all about how NetScout products are being used to help in all of these areas of telemedicine. Also on the July 21st, at 10:00 am Pacific, we're going to be offering a live webinar, demonstrating how our technology can be used before, during and after a telemedicine call for the customer. >> All right, well, Eric Gray, thank you so much for joining us really important stuff around the telehealth and telemedicine. Really appreciate all the updates. >> Thanks to have a great day. >> All right, and thank you for joining. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)