You’re a patient at a Portland hospital. But the physician you need is at Mass General. Thanks to a unique collaboration announced today between Vidyo, Inc. and the Partners Healthcare Telestroke Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), you can now be diagnosed, and have treatment recommended, by the very same physician you need, even though he’s miles away.
The Partners healthcare program, which supports 27 hospitals throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine – has deployed a telemedicine communication and collaboration solution to be used for video conferencing and sharing data to enable specialists from MGH to examine patients remotely. MGH selected Vidyo for the next stage of its telestroke program. The Partners Healthcare Telestroke Program at MGH provides 24-hour acute stroke expertise to hospitals in those states.
The Vidyo telemedicine solution enables secure, encrypted remote doctor-patient and doctor-doctor interactions that are as close as possible to face-to-face meetings, anywhere an examination, operation, or consultation needs to take place, from within medical facilities and at patient homes, clinics, other hospitals or physician home offices.
The system is portable and flexible, allowing clinicians to work at a variety of different facilities, to expand outpatient follow-up, non-acute care and provider-to-provider communications, according to hospital executives.
MGH needed Vidyo to be interoperable with installed video conferencing systems at other hospitals outside of the MGH corporate network and for the Vidyo platform to be tested with the hospitals’ firewall configurations, to make sure the platform would function with little or no support from information technology (IT) people.
In addition, the system had to be able to be adapted to every hospital environment with very little “tweaking” from the internal IT group, and to deliver extremely natural, clear video fidelity. This is especially critical when conducting acute care, like stroke exams, so that remote doctors can observe any subtleties of patient’s muscle movement and speech and detect problems, even going so far as to be able to clearly see the pupils in a patient’s eyes.
Executives at Vidyo note that the barriers to high-quality, affordable telemedicine have traditionally been high, but that the company delivers a breakthrough solution that requires little to no administrative or technical help to deploy, use and maintain, opening up access to many more practitioners and patients in rural and under-served communities where care is most needed, and now, available to all.
Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
