Virtualizing the “Other Half” of Healthcare: From Virtual Consults to Remote Surgery and Procedures

A 48-year-old man is rushed to their nearest hospital with sudden, life-threatening symptoms. There is no specialist on staff. The nearest capable center is 200 miles away. The gap to saving that person’s life is not medical expertise or technological capability. It is the infrastructure required to reliably deliver that expertise where and when it is needed. 

This is a global challenge. An estimated 5 billion people worldwide lack access to safe, affordable surgical and specialty care. In the U.S., the shortage of specialized expertise is particularly acute in rural communities. In 2022, rural areas had just 2.6 cardiologists per 100,000 residents, compared with 7.3 in urban areas. Similar disparities exist across neurology, oncology, and pulmonology and in several specialties, the gap is widening: from 2012 to 2022, the rural supply of pulmonologists declined 42%, neurologists 17%, and cardiologists 6%¹. These disparities are compounded by continued rural hospital closures and a projected nationwide physician shortage of up to 86,000 by 2036² 

At the same time healthcare access is deteriorating, the underlying technologies capable of extending expert care remotely have matured dramatically. We can video call anyone on earth in real time. Robotics can operate with sub-millimeter precision. AI can interpret imaging and support diagnostic decision-making. The digital revolution has transformed nearly every industry — but healthcare only partially. Why? 

Because healthcare is fundamentally different from other digital industries: it requires not only information exchange, but reliable physical intervention. The answer is not the technology itself. It is the infrastructure required to deliver it where it is needed most. 

TELEHEALTH PROVED THE MODEL — AND REVEALED ITS LIMITS 

Telehealth demonstrated that high-quality care could, for many use cases, be delivered virtually. In 2018, 25% of physicians used virtual visits regularly; today, 71% do weekly³. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this dramatically — forcing rapid adoption across health systems and, critically, demonstrating that virtual care could succeed at scale. 

But telehealth also revealed where that model ends. While one-off international demonstrations have shown the potential for remote interventional and surgical procedures, these capabilities are not yet part of routine clinical care in the U.S. For complex cardiac interventions, image-guided tumor ablation, robotic surgery, and other procedures requiring hands-on intervention, the patient still travels to the specialist. 

The bottom-line is that telehealth virtualizes information exchange between clinician and patient; it does not virtualize physical intervention. 

REMOTE SURGERY AND PROCEDURES EXTEND CARE BEYOND CONSULTATION 

Remote surgery and procedures extend clinical care beyond consultation into physical intervention, including endovascular procedures, tumor ablation, image-guided therapies, remote ultrasound, remote robotic surgery, and many other clinical applications. 

For example, an interventional neurologist in Seattle could perform a thrombectomy on a patient 400 miles away, a urologist in London could give a prostatectomy in Gibraltar, or an oncologist could remotely direct tumor ablation at a community hospital hundreds of miles away. 

For health systems, the value proposition is immediate. Remote procedural capabilities expand access to underserved and rural populations, improve utilization of expensive devices, reduce the burden of workforce shortages and call coverage models, and generate new revenue from patients who might otherwise leave the network. These benefits accrue from day one and compound as programs scale. 

Remote robotic surgery represents the most advanced expression of remote enablement — operations where surgeon and patient are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, yet the surgeon’s movements are transmitted with sub-millimeter precision over purpose-built, managed networks. 

While a limited number of remote surgery and procedure cases have been performed globally, most operate on bespoke, point-to-point configurations built for a specific system, procedure, and moment in time. 

THE INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIREMENT 

Remote surgery and procedures require deterministic, ultra-reliable and secure connectivity — guaranteed latency within defined thresholds, zero unplanned interruptions, and cybersecurity designed to protect clinical operations and data.  

But connectivity alone isn’t enough. 

It also requires an orchestration layer: real-time device coordination, credentialing across jurisdictions, compliance monitoring, failsafes, and integration with hospital workflows. 

The public internet wasn’t designed for deterministic connectivity. It optimizes for throughput, not reliability. It tolerates packet loss, latency spikes, and jitter. Remote interventions cannot. And no off-the-shelf platform commercially available today provides this orchestration layer at scale. 

Performing 1:1 remote procedures today requires bespoke connectivity configurations and operational workarounds at the program level. While feasible for low-volume deployment (dozens of cases annually), this does not scale to the throughput, reliability, and standardization required for high-frequency clinical use or a globally distributed model of care. 

BUILDING THE PLATFORM LAYER 

Device manufacturers are accelerating robotic adoption — more than 240 companies are developing robotic surgical systems today for all types of surgical, interventional, and diagnostic procedures — meaning healthcare providers will have more choices than ever as systems become increasingly specialized. Regulatory agencies are pursuing pathways for remote surgery and procedures. Early pilots and programs are accumulating data. What’s been missing is infrastructure that allows these elements to connect reliably at enterprise scale. 

Because one thing is clear: health systems cannot provide a separate network for each robotic system, per specialty, per site. 

This gap points to the need for a new infrastructure layer capable of orchestrating connectivity, devices, workflows, and clinical operations at scale. Sovato was built to help healthcare organizations deploy and scale remote surgery and procedure programs through a single integrated platform — engineered for deterministic performance, security, reliability, and scalability. The platform connects sites, specialties, and any robotic or device system within a growing global network. 

Our work with leading health systems, device manufacturers, and clinical partners validates a core premise: the constraint has never been surgical skill or robotic capability. It has been the absence of infrastructure capable of reliably connecting them at scale. 

THE ROLE OF AI — AND THE NON-NEGOTIABLE HUMAN 

As healthcare enters the era of AI-enabled clinical decision-making and procedural support, a new requirement emerges: ensuring a qualified human expert is always immediately reachable when those systems reach their limits. AI is rapidly advancing across surgical workflows — from planning and guidance to intraoperative decision support. But when any technology reaches the edge of its capability, escalation to a human expert must happen instantly and in real time, and the only practical solution to enable that is remotely. 

That infrastructure is not a nice-to-have. It is the safety layer that makes advanced AI in clinical settings viable at all, and it is exactly the enabling infrastructure the Sovato Platform provides. 

THE OPPORTUNITY AHEAD 

Core technologies have been demonstrated. Robotics adoption is accelerating. Regulatory frameworks are evolving. What remains is operational infrastructure connecting these elements into scalable, reliable clinical systems. 

Organizations building these systems now gain regulatory readiness, data advantage, network effects, and specialty expansion capabilities. The virtualization of the consult transformed access to expertise. The virtualization of the procedure will transform the structure of care delivery itself — shifting specialist capacity from a location-bound asset to a globally distributed resource, unconstrained by geography. 

That shift is not incremental. It is a new operating model for healthcare. The institutions that move first will define its trajectory. 

In future posts, we’ll explore the technical, regulatory, and operational dimensions of this new model of care — and what it takes to enable safe, scalable, and operationally viable remote surgery and procedure programs. 

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yulun Wang, PhD, is Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Sovato. A pioneer in telehealth and surgical robotics, he previously founded InTouch Health (acquired by Teladoc Health) and Computer Motion (merged with Intuitive Surgical), where he helped develop the first FDA-cleared surgical robot and technologies used in the world’s first transatlantic robotic surgery.