The latest version of Cisco HealthPresence solution , was debuted in the Cisco Booth at the American Telemedicine Association’s annual meeting held in San Jose, April 29- May 1, 2012.
Cisco HealthPresence leverages the network as the platform to connect people, resources, and information to deliver enhanced care-at-a-distance. The solution includes all the elements of a typical telemedicine encounter through a common user interface, while removing the technical complexity for healthcare providers and medical staff.
The latest version reflects collaboration between Cisco and Emerge.MD, a Phoenix, Arizona based-provider of telehealth SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions including workflow software.
Additional features in this release include:
• Compatibility with a broad portfolio of Cisco video platforms including Cisco Jabber Video soft client for desktops
• A scalable architecture that permits easy localization and integration with new third-party medical devices
• Enhanced workflows and support for physicians to collaborate and expand their network with specialists both inter- and intra- their healthcare network
“Cisco provides the platform for integrating partner solutions, and that enables a lot of new capabilities,’ said Rajesh Vargheese, CTO, Cisco Healthcare Solutions at the Cisco booth on the ATA exhibition floor.
Added Vincent Balsamo, Emerge.MD’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing: “It’s all about workflow, adoption, and utilization. The combined solution enables us to use the best of each other’s products and technologies to deliver seamless care”. To watch more of their discussions click here .
Cisco HealthPresence 2.1 is one among several collaborations between Cisco and Emerge.MD. The two have also worked on Webex integrations for health care providers. The Cisco Healthcare Solutions team is excited about this new partnership and what it brings to our healthcare partners and customers.
Galloping technological change, encouraging economics, new partnerships, and rising consumer acceptance together poise telemedicine for widespread global adoption, according to Cisco and other experts at the 17th American Telemedicine Association meeting this week in San Jose.
“These next couple of years, I think, are critical,” said Dr. Danny Sands, Cisco Director of Medical Informatics. “I think this is the time. This is our time.” Read More »
“What I often feel today is, nurses nurse technology rather than nurse their patients.”
So says Cisco Chief Nursing Officer Curtis Dikes, a registered nurse in his own right, whose job at Cisco is to change that.
At the American Telemedicine Association’s 2012 meeting in San Jose, Dikes was kept fully engaged by attendees newly curious about Cisco technology and the customer-oriented thinking behind it.
“It’s not about the technology,” said Dikes during a break. “Technology is a conduit – part of the equation that enables a better care process.”
Do nurses have unique workflow requirements that warrant special attention? Yes, said Dikes, past president of the American Nursing Informatics Association. “Nursing has its specifics just like medicine.”
Thousands of ATA 2012 attendees heard Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wax enthusiastic about the future of telemedicine in his Tuesday morning keynote event.
“I love the fact that telemedicine fits into this category of people trying to do good things for those that don’t have access. I love that,” said Wozniak to applause.
”It’s kind of cool for a general doctor to get in touch with a couple of specialists this way.”
In a wide-ranging conversation onstage with ATA President Dr. Bernard Harris Jr., Wozniak predicted that computer intelligence will soon rival human intelligence – with profound implications for health care.
“Computers are getting closer to acting like humans. Your phone knows when you’re touching it now… and I think eventually they will be listening and looking with their cameras and microphones… You can make devices that see better than a human.
“Once a computer gets smarter than a human, then the company that uses computers will come out ahead economically.” Read More »
Sharon Gibson, Cisco’s Director of Business Transformation and Healthcare, told how Cisco developed its employee health center, LifeConnections, at a Monday morning ATA panel on “Retail and Employer-Based Healthcare Using Telemedicine.”
Although telemedicine became an aspect of LifeConnections in September 2010, two years after the first LifeConnections center opened in San Jose, it’s become a key part of the proposition. It helps the 80 domestic Cisco campuses feel they’re getting benefits comparable to those delivered at headquarters. Overseas – particularly at the Cisco Bangalore campus, site of our second LifeConnections center, where roads and traffic pose a 24/7 challenge – telemedicine simply enables better patient access to health care.
Throughout the Cisco community, engaging employees is the prime goal for LifeConnections. The initial intent was to use health care to enhance employee productivity among a young workforce not always focused on the subject. Most health care discussions in the US revolve around cost-cutting and efficiency, which often means less access for patients, Cisco took the opposite view with LifeConnections – that more access, and more care opportunities, would lead to positive cost results going forward.
It’s worked – and telemedicine is a key part of the equation. Insights Gibson shared at ATA:
Screenings, events and provider enthusiasm are key to driving adoption over time.
Different approaches suit different geographies. In Bangalore Cisco will soon have five satellite offices using telemedicine, all open 24 hours a day, six days a week.
There’s opportunity to deliver specialty care using telemedicine technology. Working with Stanford University, LifeConnections has just launched our first teledermatology clinic.
More larger organizations are getting into corporate health care with on-site clinics – you need about 1,000 employees to make it a good investment – but Cisco is proud to be blazing trails and and winning high employee satisfaction in the process.
There’s evidence that others see lessons in LifeConnections. A co-panelist of Gibson’s pointed out that US government employees who fall ill on duty overseas are often flown home or to regional health centers at great taxpayer expense and productivity loss. A telemedicine solution could mitigate much of that. “What you’re doing at Cisco, Sharon,” he said, “needs to be shared with the State Department and the Commerce Department.”
It’s good to hear Cisco’s work is influencing others. Cisco, too, feels we have plenty to share about telemedicine.
(San Jose, April 30) ATA 2012 opened Monday morning with a survey of the scope and potential of the telemedicine market moderated by Linda Boles, Cisco Chief Strategist, US Public Sector Healthcare Innovation. The expert panel played to a packed ballroom at the San Jose Convention Center complex.
Key insight number one: telemedicine technology is maturing fast, but we’re only beginning to see its many applications – and new use cases have the capacity to surprise. Cisco, for example, expected growth in pediatric and correctional healthcare, but not the adoption we’ve seen in continuing medical education and corporate communications.
Key insight number two: it’s a consumer-led transformation. Patients, the panel heard, take directions and do as they’re told. Consumers have choice and power. That suggests all of healthcare is on the brink of dramatic, structural transformation.
Boles’ co-panelist Harry Kim, Hewlett-Packard’s senior director, worldwide healthcare, estimated the global market opportunity at a conservative $10 billion. But he cautioned that many analysts’ numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, because so many are based on a “rear-view mirror” view of the market. Kim said up to 40 percent of today’s medical encounters can be done more efficiently using telemedicine technology, but less than one percent actually are.
Another panelist, Jasper zu Putlitz MD, president of Bosch Health Care, called it a “confusing market” that sometimes frustrates adoption – precisely because the opportunities and forecasts are so disparate. “I am looking at telehealth on one side then telecare on the other. Then there’s teleconsultation, where you connect providers. With telehealth we’re at the end of the beginning. But it’s really, really promising.”
The panel agreed that:
• The industry doesn’t have a technology problem – but challenges adopting and sustaining it.
• Telehealth solutions have to be embedded into health care system redesign. It cannot be laid on top of existing processes.
• It’s not a US-centric discussion. In the US the focus is always on cost and efficiency; elsewhere the priority tends to be patient access. Look for instructive telemedicine innovations to bubble up from smaller “laboratory countries” whose models differ from ours.
Boles agreed with the panel that healthcare information exchanges overseas run far ahead of those we see in the States.
Harry Kim used an airplane metaphor: we can all build excellent airplanes, he said, but until airports and air traffic controllers are built as well – and a reliable operating environment results – it is harder for airlines to prosper. (After the Wright brothers, he added, the needed infrastructure took decades longer!)
Two last, intriguing points from the morning.
One, consumers are expected to create demand for “anytime, anywhere” healthcare delivered from many sources via many channels – including mobile. The coming continuum of health care delivery models, enabled by telehealth technology, will challenge the status quo understanding of the system.
Two, the industry has to “follow outcomes.” Which technologies change outcomes? The better we understand what leads to better health care outcomes, the bigger the flood of new operating models that answer that question.
Boles hosted a concise, invigorating morning. In a Q-and-A session she was asked if the ATA itself can help promote understanding that leads to more telemedicine adoption. Boles replied that “I think you’ll see a lot of blog coverage coming out of ATA 2012” – starting here!
Cisco Systems is presenting innovative new technology and an upbeat assessment of the 2012 telemedicine marketplace at the American Telemedicine Association annual meeting that opened Sunday at the San Jose Convention Center.
Cisco is spotlighting the latest Care-at-a-Distance solutions including the Cisco VX Clinical Assistant, a new mobile telemedicine device built expressly for medical environments and classified as a Class 1 medical device. Making its public debut at ATA is the Cisco TelePresence VX Tactical solution, a mobile video collaboration system designed in a ruggedized briefcase for field use. General availability for the solution is planned for June 2012.
Cisco Systems’ newest Telehealth solutions drew strong interest Sunday night as thousands of health care professionals converged for the start of the American Telemedicine Association 2012 meeting in San Jose.
Conventiongoers praised Cisco’s ability to devise and deliver end-to-end solutions that meet customers’ demand for simplicity – in both implementation and operation.
“Cisco provides incredible value to telehealth,” enthused Dr. Shez Partovi, chief medical information officer at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, during a visit to Cisco’s Booth 1434 on the exhibition floor. Read More »
The Director of IT solutions at Hospital Corporation of America, the world’s largest private health care facility operator with 199,000 employees, has reported high satisfaction with HCA’s recent implementation of Cisco Webex, saying it “has exceeded even our expectations.”
Andrew Kerr, who oversees IT resources for what he called a “very large dispersed workforce” staffing 163 hospitals in 20 states, described his positive Webex experience in an April 24 Cisco webcast presenting Webex advantages in healthcare environments.
2012 a “Pivotal Year” for Healthcare Transformation, Says Shehata in ATA Preview.
This is the year Cisco healthcare technology moves from creating simple collaboration environments to true innovation workspaces that generate value, particularly for accountable care organizations (ACOs) focused on quality and efficiency, said Cisco’s Ash Shehata in an online briefing to industry thought leaders.
Shehata, Cisco’s Senior Executive Director, Healthcare Business Transformation for the US, Canada, and Latin America, addressed invited bloggers and web journalists in advance of the American Telemedicine Association conference April 29 in San Jose. Read More »
Cisco Systems is announcing a next-generation solution to address an increasingly complex and common challenge in healthcare settings: the need to assure high security and patient privacy, while enabling fast, role-appropriate clinical data access for providers, with seamless connectivity across a diverse array of (mobile?) devices – all at once.
The new Cisco offering is dubbed Beyond BYOD – “BYOD” standing for “Bring Your Own Device.” It enables a healthcare organization to set up and administer secure, unified, any-device access across its entire network – including wireless, wireless LAN, cellular and VPN elements.
Healthcare information infrastructure has been challenged in recent years by an increasingly distributed healthcare delivery model, the rise of electronic patient records and privacy concerns, and the explosion of mobile devices entering hospital networks. Physicians and healthcare staff are driving demand for immediate provisioning of their personal devices from smartphones, to tablets, and notebooks for use in the workplace and integration into the clinical workflow. Indeed, there are over 4000 applications specifically dedicated to the healthcare industry and a Forrester study found 41 percent of personal devices are used to access business applications. Doctors, administrators, patients and their families all have rationales for accessing an information system – and each is likely to bring a unique device profile. Preference for their own personalized hardware over standardized, workplace-issued devices combined with the inherent need by medical professionals for anytime, anywhere connectivity – challenges network solution providers to keep up by offering true borderless networks: secure systems that are easy to use and accept all kinds of connection-ready hardware.
Beyond BYOD from Cisco answers the call by delivering healthcare providers, patients and visitors access from any device in any healthcare space, a unified policy across the network, an uncompromised user experience, and simplified IT operations.
The BYOD challenge has confronted IT managers in the healthcare sector for some time, but Beyond BYOD goes beyond simple device acceptance. Cisco has taken a new, holistic approach to managing borderless networks. The result is a top-down, comprehensive approach that can deliver a high-quality experience while allowing management of complexity and scale for healthcare organizations of all sizes – not just the large-scale enterprise.
Beyond BYOD features:
A new “Identity Services Engine” (ISE) that helps users introduce personal devices to a workplace network and configure an appropriate access level without hands-on assistance from IT.
A new, scalable approach to WLAN infrastructure that supports rich media sharing. It’s IPv6-optimized for seamless roaming without drops and enhanced security. IPv6 compatibility is critical to next-generation BYOD strategy: Cisco VNI predicts 71 percent of smartphones and tablets – 1.6 billion in total – will be IPv6-capable by 2016.
Simplified IT operations through a new Cisco management platform, Prime Assurance Manager 1.1, which affords thorough real-time, network-wide views of application performance. A companion management tool, Prime Infrastructure 1.1, aids planning and deployment of Cisco infrastructure.
Beyond BYOD represents a new, more strategic approach to healthcare information network management – one that acknowledges and enables user preferences while anticipating future demands and developments.
• Cisco Video Surveillance helps public sector organizations transform the way they protect people, property and critical infrastructure
o Urban security, city surveillance, national security, critical infrastructure, and large public events
o Disaster recovery and first responder
o Safe and secure colleges and universities
• Hyper-scalable (tens of thousands of cameras), hyper-flexible
• Rapid provisioning from 8 weeks to 15 minutes
• Reduced infrastructure costs, faster disaster recovery and deployment, reduced staffing needs and cooling costs
• Improved performance, scalability, agility and manageability
One major topic at this year’s HIMSS 2012 Conference, was accountable care programs. As January 1, 2012 marked the initial period for healthcare organizations to start the application process to become eligible for Accountable Care Organization status there was much debate about whether or not ACOs could improve healthcare while reducing costs.
The coordinated care provided by an Accountable Care Organization can help ensure that patients, especially the chronically ill, get the right care at the right time, with the goal of avoiding unnecessary duplication of services and preventing medical errors.
At this year’s HIMSS Conference, Cisco is showcasing collaboration technologies that improve the way we deliver healthcare.
Thanks to partners like AeroScout, Allscripts, Amcom, AMD Global TeleMedicine, Emerge.MD, EXTENSION, GE, Intel, McKesson, MEDITECH, NetApp, NextGen, Optum, Philips Healthcare, Radianta, Rauland-Borg, Vocera and Welch Allyn, we’re transforming clinician-to-clinician and clinician-to-patient relationships through advancements in telehealth.
If you’re in Las Vegas for HIMSS this week, stop by Cisco’s booth, #4223, where we are demonstrating how together with partners, Cisco healthcare solutions help simplify communications, facilitate collaboration, connect clinicians and provide support for the increasingly mobile healthcare environment. Read More »
