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More than two million COVID-19 cases have been recorded and more than 100,000 people have died in Latin America according to the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. When it comes to healthcare, workers continue to man the front lines and do their best to serve their patients.

When COVID-19 first struck, Purview sprang into action. We offered one of our products, software for remote diagnostic image viewing, free of charge for healthcare workers around the globe. But healthcare goes beyond traditional doctors and patients, and for Purview this also includes forensics and veterinarians.

In Latin America, two of the organizations that adopted Purview Image during the pandemic were Abanimal Imágenes Diagnósticas in Bogatá, Columbia and Instituto de Radiología in São Paulo, Brazil.

If you are licensed in a subspecialty, there is a strong likelihood that someone is seeking your opinion.  You won’t be surprised to hear that some subspecialties like Oncology, Cardiology and Neurology are always in demand. But plenty of others, including: dentistry, Orthopedics, ENT’s OBGYNs and others, are also finding demand for their services. You may be under the impression that this is a difficult and costly service to begin offering, but that just simply is not the case.

The trend had already begun, but the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has kicked it into overdrive.

Subspecialists are adopting telemedicine technology to provide their expertise to patients they never even meet. Sound exotic? It’s not. The Washington Post projects over 1 billion telehealth visits by the end of 2020. Subspecialists are finding a growing opportunity to expand their domain to patients who otherwise might not have this specialization available to them.

Many hospitals that have relied solely on their brick and mortar facilities are now realizing that their physical location is only a part of the health care arsenal they can wield. While hospital facilities are valuable, rare and difficult to reproduce, they often limit their accessibility to those that are geographically local and sufficiently mobile to take advantage of an in-person visit. Beyond the physical structure, the most valuable asset that the hospital employs are its expert physicians. With the appropriate digital infrastructure, their expertise can be deployed well beyond the four walls of the facility.

In the post-COVID-19 world, most hospitals will be scrambling to reclaim the revenue they missed during the pandemic. Certainly, a good portion of normal operational revenue will revive as patients become more comfortable returning to the hospital for non-emergency conditions and delayed procedures. But making up for the losses arising during the pandemic will be a daunting task.