Telehealth Organizations

[Gannan]

My name is Frank Gannan. I work for the Missouri Telehealth Network. (www.telehealth.muhealth.org) I have been in the telehealth field for about 7 years now.

I was just curious to see what other telehealth organizations were doing. Also i would be interested to hear what kind of equipment you are using, tech experences, network, and so on. Although I have been in this field for a while, I haven't really had much direct contact with other techies that work in the telehealth arena. (other than organizing test calls and such).

As far as our organization goes, we consist of close to 70 sites with about 36 more going in the next 12 months. All of our sites are Frame Relay T1.

We do the basics as far as telehealth goes, psyhc, cardiology, derm, ect. We do some pretty exciting this also. Last week or so, we sent a live endoscopic surgery over the IP network to a location in New Orleans. One of the most interesting parts for me was getting to watch the surgery itself.

I also keep busy trying to find solutions to things that are requested by other people. For example, Cardiology over IP video conferenceing and such.

I like what I do. It's very interesting with not a boring moment.

Like I said, I would be interested in hearing what everyone else is doing out there.

Thank you for your time.

[NormMorrison]

Hello Frank,
I work for the Fraser Health Authority in south western BC. We do not have a large telehealth network yet but will be joining one soon when all of BC's 5 health authorities will be connected by IP. We are cleaning up any possible duplicate IP issues right now and should be ready to go by late winter.

Our own authority is the poor man on the block as far as conferencing goes but I've been working on a project charter that would place at least a couple of endpoints in each of our ten hospitals.

So you actually enjoyed watching the operation? I set one up a few months ago for all the Medical Directors in the province. Preparing for it and having it happen without a hitch was fun. I averted my eyes from the actual operation though.

[Gannan]

Sounds like you have your work cut out for you. But, I have to say, being on the "ground floor" of a new telehealth project is the fun part. You will probably be involed in all aspects of healthcare. It's really interesting (that is if you like that sort of thing). If you're lucky, you'll get to watch it grow and that's really cool to.

What kind of WAN connections are you planning on using? Do you have in mind what equipment you will be using? What services will you provide?

I'll stop with the questions.

Thanks.

[mbtmike]

Hi Im Mike from Winnipeg working with MBTelehealth( www.mbtelehealth.ca) we are similar in size to you with roughly 30 sites with 35 on the schedule...we are an IP only network running a provincial Data network provided by our telco. moset of our sites have 2 MB access. We are a majority tandberg house (HSC carts and interns) we have deployed Smart Steths network Wide as well as patient cams. we are currently looking at Dental equipement..We have just gone through a bridge selection process to be able to handel our loads....I would also like to see easyer to use peripherals I find the laptop/ Steth solution troubles some and time consuming to trouble shoot with users...Let me know what you find..

[Gannan]

Mike,

I took a look at your web site and it is very nice.

I agree with you about the PC based cardiology equipment. Anything PC based, in my opinion, has more potental to be troublesome. There's alot of different things that can factor into it from the OS, the actual program, to how the enduser uses the equipment. Not to say we haven't had our share of issues with our cardiology over IP equipment. We use a combination of digital stethoscopes that were ment for H.320 and a box I made to support it over IP. They work well most of the time. Version 1 of my box had some issues but version 2 shows promise. This allows us to connect our digital stethscopes directly to our Polycoms and transmit our sounds without a PC.

I noticed on your web site that you do streaming. What equipment do you use for that? I'm just interested. We have been thinking about streaming for a while and just haven't gotten around to it yet.

If you are interested in Dental scopes, we have been looking at JEDMED (www.jedmed.com). We have been using their otoscope systems for years and they have great resolution.

[teetdogs]

I'm Brian Teeters I am a part of the Partners in Health Telemedicine Network, we are one of 3-4 networks in the state of Montana we have 28 sites around the state and many more nationwide. We both ISDN and IP networks we use all polycom for the most part except for 2 V-Tels that are being phased out. we have a MGC-100 Bridge.
Our conference center has 2 auditoriums wired for VTC Using polycom VSX 4000's 2 Classrooms wired for VTC and 3 Executive Conference rooms all wired. the rest of the rooms are covered for VTC with a rover unit. Plus we have multiple VTC units in various medical practices. our newest addition is a polycom fx 6000 on a medlink pole for our burn unit. Our medical rover uses a VSX 4000 this is what we do our echocardiograms and other various medical applications on.

If anyone is interested in a cheap and effective way of streaming your VTC's across the internet let me know its really easy and fairly cheap (as long as you have a server to do it from).