Virtual-care strategy & operations
Service design, operating model, staffing, scheduling, and quality oversight — the day-to-day system that makes virtual care reliable, not just launched.
Telemedicine Partners · Founded 2011
Telemedicine that works at Scale.
Consulting for health systems, health authorities, payers, and vendors building virtual care that holds up in practice — strategy, operations, remote monitoring, and pandemic monitoring systems.
Past work includes
Past work only — listed to show the settings this experience comes from. No current partnership or endorsement is claimed.
What we do
Every category of telemedicine, covered.
Eight service areas. Most engagements start in one and touch two or three others — that is normal, and it is why the work is scoped together, not sold in pieces.
Remote patient monitoring & chronic care
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) program design, device and workflow selection, alert triage, and escalation pathways that clinical teams can actually sustain.
Tele-specialty & hybrid care
Specialty access, e-consults, and hybrid in-person / virtual pathways that shorten waits without fragmenting care.
Workforce & training
Telemedicine technician, nurse, and physician enablement — competency, escalation discipline, and training that survives staff turnover.
Digital health, AI & workflow
AI triage, scribes, and intake; EHR (Electronic Health Record) / FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) interoperability; and the data and dashboards leaders need to run the service.
Vendor & technology evaluation
Independent evaluation, procurement support, and implementation oversight — advice that is not tied to selling you a platform.
Reimbursement, commercialization & scale
Business case, funding and reimbursement, go-to-market, and scale-up — so a working pilot becomes a funded, durable service.
Privacy, security & compliance
Architecture aligned with Canadian and US health privacy law — PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), provincial health information acts including PHIPA (Ontario) and PHIA (Nova Scotia), and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) — with governance and auditability built into the design, not bolted on after.
Flagship — National Scale
Pandemic Monitoring Systems Preparedness at National Scale
Pandemic Preparedness Architecture built around monitoring systems that see the whole country, not just one site — syndromic surveillance, early-warning cluster detection, and national population dashboards. Delivered through regional health systems, where care actually happens, so each region can scale care without adding beds and the whole system knows early when it needs to.
1
Pandemic monitoring systems — national view
Syndromic surveillance from routine encounters across regional health systems, rolled up into national population dashboards — so patterns are seen at national scale, not site by site, and leadership has one current picture to act on.
2
Early-warning cluster detection
Respiratory-cluster detection, escalation triggers, and thresholds that turn routine encounter data into an early warning — early enough to prepare, not just react.
3
Surge capacity & virtual triage
Virtual triage, remote assessment, virtual wards, and hospital-at-home pathways that scale on demand — so surge demand is absorbed by design, not by burning out the wards you have.
4
Workforce redeployment
A tiered technician / nurse / physician model with cross-coverage and training, so a region can staff a surge without starting from zero.
5
Interoperability, records & governance
FHIR-based handoff into the regional EMR (Electronic Medical Record), a single patient identity, an append-only audit trail, and governance playbooks with activation thresholds — agreed in advance, in writing, with the people who will run them.
Book a discovery call
Tell us your region and your current monitoring and surge plan. We will tell you plainly where it is exposed.
Who we serve
Built for the people who run care at scale.
Public and private healthcare organisations and health-tech vendors across our service area — Canada + First Nations, US, Caribbean, Middle East, Europe, Uruguay, Argentina, South Africa & West Africa — seeking to develop, evaluate, or enhance telemedicine and home healthcare technology, including pandemic monitoring systems preparedness designed at national scale and delivered through regional health systems.
Regional health systems
Multi-site systems that need virtual care and surge capacity designed once, for the whole region — and connected into national pandemic monitoring.
Health authorities
Public authorities planning population-level services, national-scale surveillance, and equitable access.
Hospitals
Acute and community hospitals adding virtual wards, e-consults, and hybrid pathways.
Payers & plans
Plans evaluating virtual-care value, reimbursement, and member access — without the vendor pitch.
Health-tech vendors
Vendors who need independent evaluation, clinical workflow fit, and a credible route to market.
Remote & underserved communities
Programs where distance is the barrier — including pro bono guidance work described below.
How engagements work
A fixed-scope first step. No open-ended retainer pitch.
You always know what the next phase costs, what it produces, and what decision it sets up.
01
Discover
A focused diagnostic of your current services, workforce, technology, and constraints — and where the real gaps are.
2-week diagnostic02
Design
Operating model, workflows, technology choices, governance, and business case — agreed before anything is built.
Blueprint & business case03
Pilot
A bounded pilot with real patients, real staff, and clear success measures — small enough to learn from, real enough to trust.
Bounded & measured04
Scale
Rollout, training, and oversight as the service grows — with the playbooks and dashboards to run it without us in the room.
Rollout & oversight
What leaders say
Recommendations, in their words.
Short excerpts from recommendations received on LinkedIn. Full text is on the profile linked below.
“With Ryan's expertise and hands-on support, Bayshore Health Care launched the first virtual Rheumatoid Arthritis Clinic in Thunder Bay, Ontario servicing Northern Communities.”
Mary Barr, RNDirector, National Advisory Services at Bayshore HealthCare · October 11, 2017
“Ryan has vision, can see roads to success, and can execute on these. His knowledge of the health industry is an important advantage.”
Lina Forcier, PhDEpidemiologist & CEO, Factually Health · November 16, 2021
Disclosure: Ryan Farrar Smith holds a minority equity stake in Factually Health.
“Ryan's work at navigating complex industries and government was instrumental to the project. I would highly recommend Ryan as an executive that meets the challenges of today.”
Giles CrouchCultural Anthropologist, former CMO · May 24, 2026
“He is a visionary with an uncanny ability to view projects from multiple perspectives.”
Nayyar RazviChairman, EMRANA Health; Emergency Room Physician · October 9, 2015
“A big picture thinker with an uncanny understanding to see and set strategy.”
Ryan Guite, MBAInnovative Healthcare Director · October 26, 2017
Read the full recommendations on Ryan Farrar Smith's LinkedIn profile.
About
Founded by an operator, not a theorist.
Telemedicine Partners was founded in 2011 by Ryan Farrar Smith, serving clients across Canada + First Nations, the US, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe, Uruguay, Argentina, South Africa & West Africa.
The approach is plain: design for how care is actually delivered, train the people who deliver it, and build the governance that keeps it safe when volume spikes. No hype, and no vendor platforms resold to you.
- Founded 2011 — virtual care and health technology, serving Canada + First Nations, the US, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe, Uruguay, Argentina, South Africa & West Africa.
- Past work includes Wellpoint, Bayshore, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Teladoc.
- Independence — Telemedicine Partners does not resell vendor platforms. Ryan Farrar Smith holds a minority equity stake in Factually Health; where it is relevant to an engagement, this is disclosed to the client in writing before any recommendation.
- Community commitment — pro bono telemedicine guidance to First Nations communities via First Care Connect.
Book a discovery call
Tell us what you are trying to solve. Submitting opens a pre-addressed email to info@telemedicinepartners.com — nothing is stored by this page.