The Latest in Remote Presence.

As telemedicine networks grow larger and more complex, the task of managing them has become more challenging. That’s why we’ve introduced a new product called SureView™ that puts network utilization data right at your fingertips. It’s the first acute care telemedicine network management tool of its kind, and it’s already being hailed by both network managers and hospital IT staff. In addition to providing network stats and utilization data, SureView integrates clinical workflow solutions like StrokeRESPOND for continuous monitoring of key clinical outcomes.

Before SureView, you had to contact your ITH rep to get utilization data, which was sometimes a day or two old. Now it’s available to you instantly, in a graphics-rich, easy-to-understand dashboard that you can access from any computer, any time.

Example dashboard of SureView clinical software application.

The bigger your hub-and-spoke network, the more you’ll appreciate SureView. Network administrators can quickly identify which sites and physicians are using remote presence devices the most – and those that aren’t. SureView also presents information from the StrokeRESPOND database so you can see month-over-month trends and determine whether door-to-needle time is improving.

SureView simplifies IT troubleshooting by providing a precise picture of network conditions at any time. If a physician reports a problem from the previous night, an IT person can quickly investigate to see if there were bandwidth problems or connection issues.

With SureView, it’s easy to export utilization data to Excel for easier reporting and charting. And all SureView information is sortable and searchable. For instance, you can quickly sort by endpoint battery status or wifi status to determine which units need attention.

SureView 1.0 is available now, so contact your ITH rep for details or click here for more information.

At first glance, Skype would seem like a wonderful medium for telemedicine. There are now about 180 million Skype users worldwide taking advantage of its free communications capabilities. People rave about its ease of use. So why not use this popular tool for telemedicine?

Before you hop on the Skype bandwagon, here are some great reasons to avoid it like the plague in a healthcare application:

It’s a lawsuit magnet – Skype isn’t HIPAA-compliant, so it doesn’t meet the federal requirements for ensuring the confidentiality of patient data. If you use Skype in a healthcare setting, you’ll soon be hearing the click of attorneys’ briefcases.

Risk of losing or abusing patient data – If hackers delight in stealing celebrities’ smartphone photos, think how much fun they’ll have hijacking their lab results.

No oversight – Information passed back and forth on consumer platforms like Skype and Tango can’t be effectively documented and managed by a hospital CIO or quality leaders. And if healthcare data can’t be integrated and shared, doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of team-based care?

The technology is unsafe – More worms and spyware infect computers via Skype than any other source except for music file-sharing. You may get some successful teleconsultations under your belt, but is it worth the risk of crashing your entire network?

The connection is low-grade and unreliable – Skype doesn’t offer interoperability with other video programs, and transmission quality is sometimes poor.

Risk of impersonation – Although Skype uses digital certificates for log-in, there’s no guarantee that the person you’re speaking with is really a doctor. So theoretically, an actor from Scrubs could approve your next surgery.

Those are some pretty serious drawbacks in an industry as litigious and regulated as healthcare. Skype might be a great medium for business meetings, but it’s a toxic tool for telemedicine.

The city of Craigavon in Northern Ireland is synonymous with “new” because it was built from scratch in the 1960s to lure business away from Belfast. It’s Northern Ireland’s equivalent of Portland, Oregon, with greenways and bike paths abounding. Perhaps that’s why Craigavon was receptive to another great innovation: remote presence technology.

The RP-7  serving Craigavon Area Hospital is the UK’s first telemedicine robot – and it’s helping improve care at Daisy Hill Hospital 20 miles away.

It’s part of a new healthcare blueprint called “Transforming Your Care” compiled by John Compton, CEO of Northern Ireland’s Health & Social Care board. This forward-looking plan aims to dramatically improve “high dependency care” for patients who are very ill but not quite ICU material. And that’s where the RP-7 comes in.

Dr. Charles McAllister and other intensivists at Craigavon are using the RP-7 to closely monitor patients in Daisy Hill’s 10-bed high dependency unit. That means that fewer of them need to be transported to the Craigavon ICU.

Dr. Shane Moan at Daisy Hill was skeptical at first, but now he’s a big fan of remote presence technology. “You can get a huge amount of information from the robot,” he says. “You get realtime information from the monitor, and you can see the patient up close in high definition. You can also listen to the patient’s lungs and heart through a stethoscope at the back of the robot.”

Dr. McAllister reports that patients have quickly warmed to the RP-7. “They understand that having an intensivist virtually at the bedside is a real benefit to them,” he said.

“The remote presence robot is at the cutting edge of innovation in our health service,” says health minister Edwin Poots. “And it makes the best use of our health resources.”

Northern Ireland’s population is aging, and remote presence helps deliver the highest quality care while keeping transport to a minimum. It’s probably just a matter of time until local celebrities like 67-year-old rock legend Van Morrison start using it.

To see BBC coverage of the remote presence intensivists care at Daisy Hill Hospital, click here.

The RP-7 allows intensivists to treat more critical care patients at multiple hospital locations.

Information provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We’re all aware that the number of strokes per year in the U.S. is about to cross the 800,000 threshold, but it’s shocking to see how much of that is concentrated in the Southeast region.

Just take a look at this map of the “Stroke Belt” to see how bad it’s gotten in Dixie. It makes you wonder what folks in Phoenix, Minneapolis, and Albany are doing right – and why that success can’t be repeated in the South.

When you take a closer look, you’ll see that many of the nation’s stroke “hot spots” are in underserved areas like northern Maine and in rural parts of the Pacific Northwest. But the South is where you see ample evidence of a double-whammy: a large number of rural communities that don’t have access to advanced stroke care, plus the nation’s highest rates of obesity and high blood pressure.

You’d think that most hospitals in the Southeast would be staffing up on stroke specialists left and right, but many simply can’t afford the high cost of on-site neurointensivists. That’s why telemedicine has such a huge role to play in turning the Stroke Belt into the Southern Success Zone.

Although some sections of the country are more stroke-prone, that doesn’t diminish the need for telestroke capabilities in every community. New Mexico may have enviable stroke statistics, but that doesn’t mean much to someone experiencing a possible stroke in a small town like Portales or Hobbs. Survival trumps statistics every time.

This map makes one thing crystal-clear: hospitals in the South must implement telestroke programs with an urgency akin to D-Day. This year, the number of stroke deaths will be enough to fill two NFL stadiums. That’s totally unacceptable. It’s time to declare war on stroke, with telestroke programs leading the charge.