Studies have shown that successful use of videoconferencing and real-time communications can profoundly benefit patients and doctors alike. Health care outcomes improve when truly collaborative communication takes place among doctors, specialists. Until recently, the specialized equipment, complexity and expensive network infrastructure required by video, as well as poor Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement policies made it impractical to utilize televideo technologies for care delivery unless the patient was a great distance from the doctor. Now, changing reimbursement models and low-cost desktop PC-based televideo technologies are making it easy and cost effective to use televideo in a wider array of patient and inter-clinician interactions.
Today, low cost and ubiquitous technologies exist that can facilitate a world in which videoconferencing has a place on the desk of every doctor, nurse and clinician. However, what is needed at the clinician level are applications designed specifically for the health care industry with televideo as a communications modality. These need to be extremely simple, highly secure, low cost and fully customizable. With these types of applications, health care professionals would have simple efficient communications tools to increase access to specialists, raise the overall levels of patient care, and improve delivery of treatment.
After interacting with a variety of forward-thinking healthcare professionals, SBR Health has learned that simply reducing the cost and complexity of televideo technologies itself does not solve the larger problem of how to utilize new and existing televideo technologies seamlessly in existing IT and clinical processes. Despite decreasing equipment costs and low-cost ubiquitous PC-based televideo, it remains difficult to integrate videoconferencing into health care workflows. In effect, we discovered something that proved to be true throughout health care--the success of any technology depends only 10% on the technology and 90% on how that technology is integrated with the organization’s workflow and protocols. It isn’t that the healthcare community is crying out for more, cheaper technology, but that it needs solutions to facilitate the delivery of care in a more efficient and effective manner.
SBR Health will talk about the shortcomings of utilizing video as a means of communication in delivering care to patients at multiple places within the healthcare system, spanning from pre-encounter triages, to in-hospital settings to post-discharge locations such as rehab facilities, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, or even in their own homes. We will then address how applications and user interfaces can be developed tightly couple the use of televideo with existing clinical and IT workflows to improve patient and clinician use experiences and to minimize change management issues. SBR Health will also describe how they are working closely with many leading healthcare providers
4. How to work with interpreters
Do you SPEC?
Speak directly to the patient
Pause to allow for interpretation
Everything you or the patient says
will be interpreted
Confidentiality will be maintained
This screen demonstrates how SBR’s application integrates into the clinical workflow. SBR Health provides clinical software applications that work on top of televideo systems like Skype, Vidyo, Cisco MOVI and Vsee to help increase access and improve care coordination. We are currently working with several innovative health delivery organizations such as Stanford Hospital, Kaiser Permanente, Mass General and Children’s Boston on pilots for virtual post-discharge follow up, video remote interpretation, remote triage, virtual clinics and specialist consults. Our real-time communication platform was designed specifically for the healthcare industry and is secure, low cost and fully customizable. By using our applications, health care professionals have simple communication tools that increase access to specialists, raise the overall levels of patient care, and improve the delivery of treatment. We’re addressing the shortcomings of utilizing video for care delivery through the use of low-cost video technologies, any device/network deployment, skills based routing, intelligent queuing, n-way video calling and a video based distributed call center. For more information on our platform, visit www.sbrhealth.com