For years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Justin Fulcher built a telemedicine platform argued that telehealth was ready for widespread use and that the clinical case for it was already strong. Much of the healthcare industry treated that argument as premature. Then, within a matter of weeks in early 2020, institutions that had resisted digital health programs for a decade began implementing them without hesitation. His perspective is shaped by genuine experience on both sides of the public-private divide. Justin Fulcher co-founded RingMD, a telemedicine platform that scaled across Asia, before transitioning into government service as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense. In that role, he focused on acquisition reform and technology modernization, working on initiatives that compressed software procurement timelines from years to months.

Infrastructure, Not a Convenience

“It confirmed something I’d believed for years but struggled to make the broader industry accept: telehealth isn’t a convenience feature. It’s healthcare infrastructure,” Justin Fulcher said. The pandemic did not introduce new capability. It removed the option to treat remote care as optional, forcing institutions to adopt tools that had already been available and clinically sound long before anyone declared a public health emergency.

Fulcher describes the shift in blunt terms. “That’s a brutal way to be proven right, but the outcome, which is a permanent shift in how healthcare systems think about remote care, is meaningful,” he said. “Ten years of adoption got compressed into months.” He points to hospital systems that had spent a decade citing liability concerns, reimbursement rules, and patient preference as reasons to delay, only to launch full telehealth programs within weeks once there was no alternative.

A Story Bigger Than the Pandemic

He is careful to frame the moment as more than a temporary emergency response. In his account, COVID exposed how much organizational resistance, rather than technical limitation, had been holding telehealth back all along. Once hospitals and clinics were forced to operate under pandemic conditions, the systems that had claimed remote care wasn’t feasible discovered it was, and many kept the programs running long after the initial emergency eased.

For Justin Fulcher, the pandemic did not create the case for telehealth. It simply removed every excuse institutions had used to avoid acting on a case that, in his view, had already been made years earlier. See related link for more information.

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