Expert Interview: Josh Botbol, COO of GlobalMed, on Expanding Specialty Care Through Virtual Health Technology
At the Geldwert Bunion Center, we see patients every week who have been living with chronic foot pain for years, not because the right treatment didn't exist, but because getting to the right specialist felt out of reach. The travel. The time. The cost of a first consultation before a single treatment decision has been made.
That problem is exactly what GlobalMed was built to solve. GlobalMed powers the world's most advanced virtual health technology platform, connecting patients to clinical-grade specialist care regardless of geography. Their systems are trusted by the White House Medical Unit, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and healthcare organizations across 60+ countries. We sat down with GlobalMed COO Josh Botbol to understand what that technology means for specialty practices and the patients they are trying to reach.
Q: A lot of our patients are flying to New York just for an initial consultation. Is telemedicine actually equipped to handle that kind of specialist evaluation?
Josh: More than most people realize. Our platform goes beyond a standard video call with a provider. Instead, it delivers clinical-grade imaging, real-time diagnostic data, and a secure environment where a specialist can conduct a thorough evaluation remotely. For a first consultation, the experience is comparable to being in the room with the provider, and best of all, the patient gets care without getting on a plane.
Q: What about post-operative care? After surgery, most out-of-town patients can’t stay close by for an extended period of time, especially those who live thousands of miles away.
Josh: That's actually where most specialty practices fall apart. Once the patient goes home, they're relying on whoever is local, and whoever is local doesn't have the surgical context. With GlobalMed, Dr. Geldwert stays in the picture throughout recovery.
For example, with our OneStep platform, patients can use their smartphone to capture gait and mobility data that feeds directly back to the care team. There's no wearable to fuss with, no separate hardware to ship, and Dr. Geldwert gets 30+ objective motion indicators so he can track progression the same way he would if you were coming in every week. If something looks off, he catches it before it becomes a setback.
On the exam side, eNcounter®’s Clinical Care suite lets Dr. Geldwert do a real visual assessment remotely. He can examine wound healing through high-resolution diagnostic image capture, annotate and measure what he's seeing, and document it directly in the patient record. If there's a follow-up question or a decision about when to return, the conversation happens in the same secure platform, not through a string of phone calls with someone who wasn't in the operating room.
The goal is to prevent distance from changing the quality of who is managing your recovery. It's still the surgeon, with the same clinical picture, making the same decisions they'd make in clinic.
Q: Dr. Geldwert works with elite athletes at events like the US Open and the Olympics. Those athletes can't pause training to travel for specialist care. Does GlobalMed's technology serve that environment?
Josh: That's actually a natural fit for us. We build platforms and delivery systems for environments where conventional infrastructure doesn't exist. One of them that you could use in an athletic event setting is our Transportable Exam Backpack. It carries a full suite of diagnostic tools anywhere in the world, including a venue, a tournament facility, or an Olympic training site. Medical staff can set it up on-site, connect to eNcounter®, and Dr. Geldwert conducts a live clinical visit with real imaging capability from wherever he is. He's seeing the tissue and making a decision, not guessing based on a phone description.
Q: Dr. Geldwert invented the HyperFlex™ device because the existing standard wasn't good enough. Is that a familiar mindset at GlobalMed?
Josh: Very familiar. GlobalMed started because people in remote and underserved areas were getting worse care simply because of where they lived, not because the medicine wasn't available, but because no one had built a way to deliver it. The technology existed to help more patients, but the infrastructure to connect them to the right specialist didn't. So we built it ourselves.
Q: For a specialty practice that has never used telemedicine, where does implementation actually start?
Josh: Usually, it starts with a conversation about what the practice already does well and where patients are slipping through. For a practice like Geldwert Bunion Center, there are people researching minimally invasive bunion surgery from across the country who never book an appointment because they can't make the trip to New York for an initial consultation. That's a solvable problem, and it's typically the first place we focus.
From there, implementation is less disruptive than most practices expect. The clinical workflow doesn't change. Dr. Geldwert still conducts the exam, reviews imaging, and makes the call. What changes is that the patient can be anywhere when that happens. GlobalMed handles the setup and support so the practice isn't figuring out technology on top of running a busy clinic.
GlobalMed builds the infrastructure for distributed care, providing the integrated hardware and software that power clinical care across distance, trusted by the White House Medical Unit, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and healthcare organizations in over 60 countries.
