Building a telemedicine platform is a technical problem. Getting doctors to use it is something else entirely. Justin Fulcher discovered this quickly after launching RingMD in Singapore. Consumer demand for the platform was strong in markets where healthcare access was limited, the appeal of a video call with a licensed physician was obvious. Physicians were a different audience. The medical community viewed telehealth as unfamiliar ground and a source of professional uncertainty rather than an extension of their practice.
Fulcher’s response was direct. “This is not a replacement for in-person,” he told skeptical practitioners. “This is an augmentation to what you’re currently doing.” By his own account, winning that argument was every bit as demanding as the technical work of building the platform itself. Telehealth had been attempted for decades but had only consistently gained traction when bandwidth, billing, institutional culture, and back-office conditions aligned and in the early 2010s, that alignment was still rare.
What the Platform Offered Providers
RingMD was designed with the provider experience in mind. Physicians worked from a split-screen interface that displayed patient EMR history alongside the active consultation. Notes could be shared in text and video formats. Patients could upload files in real time, and for those with wearable devices, vital signs including pulse and blood pressure could be transmitted live during the session. Clinical decision support tools ran alongside the consultation, giving providers data-backed context for their assessments.
Justin Fulcher ran the platform according to a set of data culture principles: driving data practices from leadership down, eliminating information silos, building patient privacy into the architecture rather than treating it as an afterthought, and investing in training so that staff could work intelligently with the data the system generated. The platform stored every interaction securely, with anonymized data feeding population-level health insights to hospitals and administrators.
Validation at Scale
The hard work of building provider trust paid off. At its peak, RingMD supported 10,000 healthcare providers across more than fifty countries, with 1.5 million patient records in the system. In 2017, Forbes named Justin Fulcher to its 30 Under 30 Asia list and Microsoft recognized him as a Data Culture Champion in Asia.
The COVID-19 period provided the most direct validation of the argument Fulcher had been making to skeptical doctors for years. With in-person care suddenly constrained globally, telehealth moved from optional to essential almost overnight. “I’ve seen almost 10 years of progress happen in a matter of months,” Fulcher said at the time a summary of what the shift in medical culture had long been resisting and finally accepted. Refer to this article to learn more.
Find more information about Justin Fulcher on https://about.me/justinfulcher