From care coordination and discharge planning to public health and continuing medical education, Polycom® RealPresence® video collaboration solutions help improve healthcare
HIMSS 2013, NEW ORLEANS, La. – Mar. 4, 2013 – Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open, standards-based unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), today showcased at the HIMSS 2013 Conference (booth #1320) several technology and developer partner solutions for a variety of healthcare applications using Polycom HD video, voice, and content sharing and management capabilities. Together, Polycom and its partners are helping to drive preventative medicine, reduce unnecessary hospitalizations, and extend the reach and capabilities of telehealth networks.
Healthcare organizations around the world turn to Polycom® RealPresence® collaboration solutions to transform how they teach, learn and deliver care. Polycom solutions eliminate the distances between patients and caregivers, between physicians and educators, and between medical facilities. By bringing caregivers and patients, multi-disciplinary medical teams, and administrative staffs together face-to-face in HD video quality, independent of location, Polycom RealPresence solutions reduce patient evaluation times, extend the reach and capacity of physicians with the ability to consult with patients remotely, improve medical education, enhance caregiver productivity and quality of life, streamline hospital operations, reduce costs, and ultimately help save lives by accelerating access to experts in times of crisis.
“Healthcare organizations are under pressure to deliver the best possible patient care with reduced resources. At the same time they’re challenged by the aging population and a shortage of healthcare providers in many cities and regions,” said Steve Pattison, Vice President of Technology Developer Partners and Business Development at Polycom. “Polycom RealPresence video solutions combined with our partners’ technology provide healthcare facilities, healthcare professionals, and medical educators great new tools to deal with these challenges by extending collaborative healthcare networks to connect experts to where they’re needed most, and by facilitating prevention and wellness models of care that are much better for the health of patients as well as the industry’s bottom line. With partners like AMD, Eceptionist and GlobalMed, we offer healthcare providers more ways to coordinate care and share knowledge in more effective, productive, and budget-friendly ways.”
Anchored by the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform – the most comprehensive and interoperable software infrastructure for universal video collaboration – Polycom video offerings can be used in conjunction with partners’ products to meet a range of emerging use cases in the healthcare field, including using live or on-demand video to support care coordination, records compliance, education efforts, and more. For example:
- AMD Global Telemedicine – AMD offers a series of cameras, dermascopes, nasopharyngoscopes, ophthalmoscopes, and telephonic stethoscopes. When combined with Polycom RealPresence video and audio solutions, AMD Global Telemedicine and Polycom provide easy-to-use, high-quality telemedicine tools for emergency rooms and urgent care centers, pediatric and general practitioner offices, or specialists’ offices like dermatology or ear-nose-throat (ENT). AMD Global Telemedicine and Polycom also partner to help healthcare providers acquire, store and forward medical images as part of a live video telemedicine consultation.
- Eceptionist –.Eceptionist is a web-based solution used around the world on a daily basis by the most respected names in healthcare to manage, schedule and coordinate multiple forms of virtual and non-virtual telehealth services, referral and service triage, extra enterprise scheduling, care pathways and wait lists. Eceptionist supports telehealth, referrals, scheduling and reporting and can easily be configured to support intelligent referral and scheduling processes. Eceptionist connects with the Polycom RealPresence Platform software infrastructure to schedule and manage all aspects of virtual collaboration.
- GlobalMed – Working with Polycom, GlobalMed integrates video conferencing and collaboration solutions into its medical peripherals and cloud-based image and data management software, creating one portable system, extending the solutions to hospitals, teaching institutions, clinics, and home healthcare environments. Their solutions are deployed on a global basis into hospitals, federal and teaching institutions, clinics, and corporate and home healthcare environments. Through this key partnership, physicians are able to maximize their collaboration efforts using GlobalMed’s Encounter™ management system, enabling virtual health consultations with the ability to capture patient video, vital signs, and visible and non-visible light images, all of which make best use of the clinical workflow across the entity’s care ecosystem.
The Polycom RealPresence Platform software infrastructure provides robust provisioning, management, scalability, reliability, flexibility, and security for secure face-to-face video collaboration in any environment. In July 2012, Polycom announced a rich new suite of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitate the development of custom applications, such as scheduling solutions, to extend the value of the Polycom RealPresence Platform software infrastructure. Aimed at making video collaboration easier to integrate into everyday business processes, the APIs allow Polycom developers and technology partners to tailor applications that seamlessly integrate with Polycom RealPresence video solutions.
Demonstrations
Polycom will also demonstrate key solutions and videos in booth #1320 at HIMSS 2013 in New Orleans, LA, March 3-7, 2013. Clinicians, healthcare educators and administrators currently use these applications in the areas of telehealth, continuing medical education and patient administration to help reduce costs, expedite patient evaluation and ultimately save lives. Sample use cases include:
- Discharge Planning – Learn how collaborative multi-point video calls using the Polycom RealPresence Platform software infrastructure, Polycom® RealPresence® Group Series solution, Polycom® RealPresence® Media Manager software, Polycom® RealPresence® Mobile 2.2 app, and Polycom RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite software can connect the care team, patients and family for better discharge planning and reduced readmissions.
- Accountable Care Organization (ACO) planning and implementation – See how Polycom RealPresence Platform software infrastructure and Polycom RealPresence Media Manager software deliver prevention and wellness programs to the patient at home, in long-term care settings or at a community center.
- Public health prevention and wellness – Witness a live telehealth call using the GSA schedule approved Polycom® RealPresence® Practitioner Cart® 8000 (see related press release), to connect distant patients to specialists or groups of patients to live multi-point educational sessions for peer-to-peer medical education.