Three reasons why the UK’s leading oncology hospital chose Zoom

As the way healthcare is delivered continues to evolve with technology, it is ever more critical for doctors, nurses, specialists, labs, and so many others involved in a patient’s care to effectively communicate and collaborate. That’s why healthcare organisations and hospital groups around the world need to have the best communication tools to support both their patients and their practitioners to deliver that care most effectively.

Being able to interact with your doctor virtually - whether that’s outpatient care delivered in the comfort of your own home, or a consultation with an expert based in a different region or even country - is popular, has improved the patient experience, and made services easier to access, democratising care. Zoom is at the forefront of this trend, and 8 out of the 10 largest US health systems chose Zoom. 

In the UK, the country’s leading oncology hospital, The Royal Marsden in West London, known around the world for its work treating cancer, has been working with Zoom to explore how best to harness the power of telehealth technology to meet patients’ evolving needs. Ahead of Zoomtopia, when David Newey, CIO of Royal Marsden Hospital, will be giving a talk on his experience migrating the hospital on to the Zoom platform earlier this year, here’s a sneak peak into the three of the main reasons they decided to adopt Zoom:

1. Zoom is familiar to, and trusted by, the British public. Zoom was the most downloaded app in the Apple App Store in the UK in 2020 due to a combination of being easy to use, reliable in low-bandwidth environments and not requiring users to have an account before being able to join a Zoom meeting. Zoom remains widely used with data from the regulator Ofcom showing that one in four UK adults (26%) use Zoom to send messages or make video or voice calls. That Zoom experienced widespread adoption by the British public was important to Royal Marsden according to David Newey:

“We chose Zoom because of its adoption by the public - the last thing we want is patients using a technology that they’re not familiar with in an already stressful situation whereby they are trying to speak to their clinician to understand the progression of their disease.”

2. Zoom can scale and be fully integrated into the Epic patient management system at pace. When the pandemic struck, the UK’s leading children’s hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) contacted Zoom in need of video visit capabilities. Within just eight days, Zoom succeeded in implementing video visit capabilities for 5,000 staff and patients, and fully integrating Zoom into the hospital's existing Epic systems. According to the Royal Marsden’s David Newey, GOSH’s experience was an important consideration when choosing to migrate to Zoom: 

“We were impressed by the speed of Zoom’s implementation and support function, which gave us confidence in their ability to deploy an Epic integrated Zoom instance to our clinical staff and patients.”  

Great Ormond Street is known around the world as a centre of excellence in child healthcare. Read our case study on how Zoom is helping to deliver that world-class care.

3. At Zoom, third-party certifications and standards are integral to our security programme’s foundation. We know that security and privacy are fundamental to a successful healthcare organisation, which is why we’re equipping providers with features that help safeguard the exchange of important information via Zoom. These include meeting passcodes, using 256-bit AES-GCM encryption as our standard for real-time meeting audio, video, and shared content in transit across Zoom Meetings, Zoom Webinars, Zoom Contact Center, and Zoom Phone data transmitted over the public internet, as well as offering the ability to enable end-to-end encryption for Zoom Meetings and one-to-one Zoom Phone calls on the same account. 

Register here to attend Zoomtopia on 17th November 2022 and see David’s fireside chat with the UK healthcare team.

When choosing a communications platform, or any software that deals with valuable patient healthcare information, it’s vital that providers can trust that patient data will be exchanged and stored safely. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) has launched the NHS Digital Health Standards Audit to evaluate all digital health technology products deployed by the NHS, and whether they can demonstrate they meet its Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC). These are considered baseline standards and are required by law under the Health and Social Care Act 2012.  

These standards are important as they provide NHS staff and patients with confidence that the digital health tools they are using meet stringent clinical safety, data protection, technical security, interoperability, usability, and accessibility standards set out by the NHS.

To support the NHS as they work to provide patients with effective and secure digital care, Zoom is DTAC and DCB0129 ready, with a DSP Toolkit in place.

• DTAC: The DTAC enables healthcare organisations to assess suppliers at the point of procurement to make sure new digital technologies meet minimum baseline standards. Zoom complies with DTAC criteria. 

• DCB0129: The DCB0129 is a clinical risk management standard that enables manufacturers of health IT software to demonstrate the clinical safety of their products and provides a set of requirements suitably structured to ensure the effective application of clinical risk management.

• DSP toolkit: Zoom has also put a DSP toolkit in place, which is an online self-assessment tool that allows organisations to measure their performance against the National Data Guardian’s 10 data security standards. All organisations that have access to NHS patient data and systems must use this toolkit to provide assurance that they are practising good data security and that personal information is handled correctly.

To learn more about Zoom’s approach to privacy, explore our Trust Center or request access to Zoom’s DTAC toolbox by getting in touch.