Dive Brief:
- Telehealth company Teladoc Health is adding new artificial intelligence capabilities to its virtual care platform, it announced Wednesday.
- The new capabilities include a “contactless” approach to remotely monitoring patients’ vital signs and an AI scribe that will record and transcribe clinical encounters to create notes, according to the announcement.
- The scribing tool is now available but only select customers can currently use the vitals monitoring feature in private preview. The latter is expected to be released broadly in December.
Dive Insight:
Teladoc’s Solo platform supports various virtual care tasks, including e-consultations, virtual nursing and patient observation. The platform uses information from various sources, including EHRs, wall-mounted and mobile cameras and tablets, to create analytics dashboards for care teams.
Now, the company is introducing the SoloVitals and SoloScribe capabilities. SoloVitals allows care teams to track patients’ heart and respiratory rates without touching them. Solo devices with a camera capture patients' facial skin color and use an optical technique to measure changes in blood volume by analyzing changes in skin color.
SoloScribe is an ambient AI documentation feature for both in-person and virtual visits. The capability records and transcribes the visit, creating clinical notes for the clinician.
Joby McKenzie, general manager of North American Health Systems at Teladoc Health, emphasized that integrating the new features into a single platform is a significant benefit.
“Health systems are under intense pressure to do more, yet they are spending more time navigating a growing number of platforms, tools and vendors, each requiring different technology and processes,” he said in the press release.
While integration could reduce point-solution fatigue, it would also benefit the digital health vendor. Integrating new features and expanding into popular health IT segments can help drive growth and attract investment dollars as digital health funding climbs.
Teladoc Health needs that boost as the company continues to struggle. After reporting significant losses, including a net loss of $200.3 million in 2025, the company lowered its 2026 revenue outlook in July.
The company expects to earn $2.36 billion to $2.45 billion in revenue this year, down 5% from its earlier guidance, primarily due to its beleaguered mental health division, BetterHelp. During Teladoc’s second-quarter earnings call, CEO Chuck Divita said that demand outstripped BetterHelp’s capacity, though the division added 2,000 more providers credentialed to accept insurance.
