By Amy Tierney
With the growing demand of mobile solutions, healthcare companies are turning to telepresence solutions to offer patient care from miles away.
Polycom, a provider of telepresence, video and voice communication solutions, is using its telehealth and telemedicine networks to help hospitals and other healthcare organizationsextend visual communication capabilities outside of their private networks.
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“Demand for telehealth programs is exploding because it addresses one of the fundamental challenges facing the healthcare industry today, which is that there are not enough doctors and they are unevenly distributed,” said Dr. Deborah Jeffries, director of healthcare markets,Polycom ( News – Alert), in a statement. “Polycom telehealth solutions address this issue by bringing physicians to the point of care, regardless of their location.”
The company recently announced it’s using an enhanced solution to Expand telehealth Initiatives to additional hospitals, community health clinics and doctors.
The enhance solution includes Polycom Converged Management Application, a video network management system, Polycom CMA Desktop, a scalable, cost-effective solution for PC-based desktop video conferencing, and the Polycom Video Border Proxy line of network-aware firewall traversal systems, which work with existing firewall infrastructure to allow secure video calling between networks.
The standards-based offering delivers high-quality visual communication capabilities, and lets users share video, audio and content from medical devices. It also features interoperability with other standards-based telehealth, telepresence and video conferencing solutions.
Organizations Ontario Telemedicine Network are benefiting from the new solution. OTN, a service provider for hospitals and health clinics throughout the Ontario province, expanded its existing capabilities to address growing demand. OTN operates one of the largest, most active telehealth networks in the world. The network includes more than 1,500 video systems. The group estimates it facilitated more than 53,000 clinical consultations and more than 12,000 education and training events in 2008.
“Demand for telehealth services in Ontario is outstripping supply even with our growth rates of between 20 (percent) to 40 percent a year,” said Ron Riesenbach, vice president of emerging business, OTN, in a statement. “There are approximately 150,000 healthcare professionals in the province. We service several thousand of them, but we have many more thousands yet to connect. The Polycom solution helps address the scalability, cost and network issues by allowing us to more easily provision secure, high-quality personal telehealth capabilities to users and clinics outside of our VPN overlay network. With this new technology, we are starting to enable new sites with telehealth capabilities in less time, and at a reduced cost.”
Polycom’s solution also features unique quality of service technology that offers a consistent, high-quality experience for users on public networks that can experience network congestion and packet loss. Polycom Lost Packet Recovery’s error correction technology helps minimize the impact of network congestion and packet loss.
OTN plans to connect 300 users with the new Polycom solution, and expects to add thousands of additional sites next year, company officials said. Officials said the expanded network will also broaden telehealth applications.
Telehealth is now used for real-time consultations between specialists at larger hospitals and patients at their community health centers. For instance, a telestroke program connects stroke neurologists to emergency rooms to help evaluate time-critical patient needs. Telehealth is also used in mental health and treatment options and to enhance medical care in correctional facilities. Healthcare practitioners and health system professionals also use the OTN network to access an active program of educational and administrative events, officials said.
OTN is using the Polycom CMA Desktop as part of a key component of its pandemic response planning for the current H1N1 virus. The OTN telehealth capabilities help healthcare happen across distances, which can boost response times and protecting doctors from infection.
“There are numerous potential applications for telehealth and interest is growing because it delivers significant, tangible benefits, including improving access to quality care, improving efficiency and the distribution of clinical expertise, enhancing education and training, and helping lower overall healthcare costs,” Jeffries said.
Amy Tierney is a Web editor for TMCnet, covering unified communications, telepresence, IP communications industry trends and mobile technologies. To read more of Amy’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Source: http://hdvoice.tmcnet.com/topics/unified-communications/articles/65182-polycom-boosts-telehealth-telemedicine-programs-healthcare-groups.htm
