Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Zipnosis is bucking traditional telemedicine wisdom in two ways. One, the company has always worked to deliver telemedicine services to patients by working with their existing provider. Two, they are moving away from video visit as the default for telemedicine.

“I always looked at phone and video as more of an analog model,” said Jon Pearce, CEO of Zipnosis. “I said we have to be a digital company. I love to ask people ‘When was the last time you bought something on Amazon using a video visit?’ You haven’t. The standard of convenience has been set outside of healthcare and I think what we’re trying to do is push the technology in a way that connects those patients and providers in an efficient and elegant experience.”

At HIMSS18 in Las Vegas, Zipnosis will show a new chat interface it has been piloting with Methodist Health System in North Texas.

In addition, the company will be talking about its work on the regulatory side to advance the cause of telemedicine, including reimbursement.

“The other side of what we’re trying to do at the conference is around policy and education around the ROI of virtual care, that’s kind of where we’re at,” Pearce said. “We’ve been doing a lot of work on the federal level and also at the state level to really help legislators, help economists understand the value, not just of phone and video, but really a much more mode-agnostic approach to virtual care and we think there’s going to be some good progress there.”

Whereas many large telemedicine companies are offering services via health insurers or direct to consumer, Zipnosis continues to focus on enabling providers to launch their own telemedicine services.

“We absolutely believe that healthcare is still local and we believe that it’s the longterm and the right solution not only for the best quality care but also for the most affordable care for patients,” Pearce said “The healthcare providers haven’t moved quick enough. The incentives haven’t been there and change is hard in healthcare.”

Pearce said that’s starting to change, and he sees Zipnosis as being in a good position to be one of the companies providers turn to when they realize the need for a telemedicine service.

“We’ve added a lot of patient-facing tools as well as we now support full bidirectional interface between Epic, Cerner, and athena, so all three of those EMRs we have running with multiple clients in multiple instances,” he said.

Zipnosis will be at Booths 10328 and 8700-16.