How to Build a Reliable Telehealth Experience: Insights from Jane App

In most industries, a buggy video call product is an inconvenience. However, in healthcare, when a clinician can't connect to their patient, or when audio cuts out mid-sentence, the consequences are severe. Patients don’t come back, and practitioners become unenthusiastic about virtual care.

That’s where Jane stands apart. Powering over 240,000 practitioners across North America, Jane has built its practice management platform around a simple principle of reliability being non-negotiable.

From scheduling and telehealth to charting and payments, Jane sits at the centre of care delivery, setting the bar for what dependable virtual care should look like.

In this article, we unpack how their team defines and delivers reliability at scale using Whereby’s video call API. You can also watch the full episode on the Health Tech Pigeon Podcast.

What does reliability mean in virtual care?

Ask most teams what "reliable" means, and you'll get a technical answer: uptime, latency, error rates. This matters, but in a clinical context, reliability has a second dimension that's harder to quantify and easier to underestimate.

“Reliability is emotional as much as it is technical,” says Katrina Baxter Moore, Senior Product Manager at Jane. “It’s not just about whether the video is working. It’s whether your patient trusts that it will work every time.”

This focus on reliability was obvious from the very first conversation Jane had with Whereby. You can have all kinds of fancy features and AI-powered capabilities, but what's critical is that the audio and video quality are good.

So you need to focus on whether the call can actually take place, and that patients aren't spending half the session troubleshooting a problem that shouldn't be there. That’s reliability in virtual care.

The first hurdle: Get clinicians to show up

Before any platform can prove its reliability, busy clinicians have to actually use it.

From what the team at Jane experienced, healthcare professionals don't adopt new tools out of curiosity. Their days are fully booked, their admin load is already significant, and any time spent wrestling with a clunky interface could go towards seeing more patients.

For solo practitioners, especially those who simultaneously run a business and deliver care, the real value of a virtual care tool lies in how much time they can get back.

As Jess Heck, Product Marketing Manager at Jane, puts it: "We talk a lot about pajama time. That’s making sure we're reducing the time clinicians have to spend doing work after hours. They really want to be spending time with their clients, not their admin."

So when positioning a virtual care solution, Jane focused on;

• Ensuring that it embeds naturally into their existing workflow

• Delivering a sense of progress from the first session

• Actually giving clinicians time back to see their patients

Optimize the telehealth experience for user behaviour

Consider a scenario where call quality is technically stable, but the patient still feels unsure about the experience. This is usually something simple that design choices can fix. It could be that the pre-call setup asked them to complete four steps when two would do. Or maybe a button they've clicked a hundred times has moved position.

You have to optimize the onboarding process and user experience based on how patients and practitioners interact with virtual systems. This is especially important when you’re integrating a new system into a platform they’re already familiar with.

"Something as small as moving a button can really affect trust," says Katrina. "People have an ingrained flow, especially practitioners who are going through the same interface eight times a day. When that changes even in a small way, it breaks something."

Choose a reliable and collaborative video call provider to partner with

When Jane decided to move their telehealth infrastructure to Whereby Embedded, it reflected how they think about both product and partnership.

Whereby is a browser-based video call API, which means there’s no need for practitioners and patients to install another app. The integration also meant clinicians didn’t need to learn how to navigate a new platform. It was just a seamless video experience woven directly into the Jane interface.

That simplicity matters a lot in healthcare, where every additional step in the patient journey is a potential drop-off point.

What stood out most to the Jane team was how smooth the migration was.

"I'm used to things getting delayed," says Jess. "That's just the nature of tech. But the Whereby team was so communicative, even across a significant time zone difference between Vancouver and Europe. We actually sped up our timeline. It was more than a pleasant surprise; it actually blew me away."

The relationship itself was also different. Whereby didn’t just take requests at face value. They asked questions, challenged assumptions, and worked with Jane to get to the right solution for their practitioners.

That collaborative approach is what Katrina points to as the real marker of a genuine partnership. "What I've found with the Whereby team is that they weren't afraid to challenge us. Instead of only doing what we asked, they’d challenge the brief when they think there's a better way, then we'd work it out together. And that makes the output better."

Since then, the impact has been felt across the business. With a more reliable telehealth experience, their support teams are no longer stuck troubleshooting live sessions or fielding calls from frustrated practitioners and patients mid-session.

"Support doesn't have to shoulder that anymore," says Katrina. "And knowing our product needs less firefighting frees our team to focus on what's next."

How to measure technical reliability in virtual care

For Jane, measuring reliability meant looking beyond infrastructure metrics to the signals that show whether trust is actually being built. These include:

1. Adoption over time: Are clinicians coming back and using telehealth consistently? Jane tracked a sustained increase from 20% to 40% of practitioners actively using telehealth, even post-pandemic, when usage might have been expected to drop off.

2. Call quality ratings: Jane collects star ratings from both practitioners and patients after every call. After migrating to Whereby's video infrastructure, the share of good ratings (4-5 stars) climbed to 90% and held there even through their highest-volume periods.

Prioritize reliability as an ongoing feature

The healthcare technology sector is in the middle of a significant moment. AI-powered clinical tools are raising new questions about what it means for healthcare to be trustworthy.

Against this backdrop, Jane shows that reliability is a compounding asset. When clinicians trust that their tools will work, they adopt them. When they adopt them, they use them consistently, and when they use them consistently, patients get better access to care.

"We've figured out reliability, and now we can build," says Katrina. "But we're still really mindful about what we build and why. The foundation matters. Without it, everything else is on sand."

For any health tech company evaluating its video infrastructure, that's worth sitting with. The right provider is the one that treats reliability as a shared responsibility, challenges you to think harder about the problems you're actually solving, and shows up as a partner, not just a vendor.

That's the standard Jane found in Whereby. So if you’re looking to build a reliable telehealth experience, explore how Whereby Embedded can help you deliver this.