Justin Fulcher Made Telehealth Free During COVID. Here Is Why

When COVID-19 arrived in early 2020, Justin Fulcher had recently returned to Charleston, South Carolina after years building a telehealth platform across Southeast Asia and managing its transition to new ownership. RingMD had been relaunched in the United States in 2019. Within weeks of his return, the pandemic changed the environment entirely.

Fulcher’s response was to make a white-labeled version of the platform available at no cost to doctors, hospitals, and healthcare organizations. The move was consistent with the logic behind RingMD from the beginning: the problem driving the company was insufficient access to healthcare, not insufficient willingness to pay for it.

The Platform That Was Already Ready

RingMD had not been built for a pandemic. It had been built for a pattern Fulcher noticed during seven years in Southeast Asia a population with smartphone access and no meaningful access to healthcare. Justin Fulcher had started the company as a prototype, with no formal structure and no pitch materials, after observing that gap firsthand. The Jakarta scene that came to define RingMD’s origin story a man with an Android phone drinking contaminated water from the ground made the stakes concrete.

By the time Justin Fulcher stepped back from the company in January 2025, RingMD was operating in more than fifty countries, held 1.5 million patient records, and maintained a network of 10,000 healthcare providers. Its client roster included India’s Digital India programme and the US Indian Health Service, the latter serving roughly 2.6 million American-Indian and Alaska Native individuals across 37 states. The free offering during COVID was not an anomaly. It was consistent with what Fulcher had been building toward since nineteen. Visit this page on LinkedIn, for additional information.

More about Justin Fulcher on https://medium.com/@JustinFulcher

When COVID-19 arrived in early 2020, Justin Fulcher had recently returned to Charleston, South Carolina after years building a telehealth platform across Southeast Asia and managing its transition to new ownership. RingMD had been relaunched in the United States in 2019. Within weeks of his return, the pandemic changed the environment entirely. Fulcher’s response was…