Polycom, Inc. (NASDAQ: PLCM), the global leader in telepresence, video and voice communication solutions, is making it easier and more cost-effective for hospitals and other healthcare organizations to deploy and scale telehealth and telemedicine networks. Through an enhanced, highly scalable solution, Polycom allows healthcare organizations to easily and securely extend visual communication capabilities outside of their private networks to a broader group of partner hospitals, community clinics and physicians.
"Demand for telehealth programs is exploding because it addresses one of the fundamental challenges facing the healthcare industry today, which is that there are not enough doctors and they are unevenly distributed," said Dr. Deborah Jeffries, director of healthcare markets, Polycom. "Polycom telehealth solutions address this issue by bringing physicians to the point of care, regardless of their location."
The enhanced Polycom solution combines the Polycom Converged Management Application™ (CMA™), a comprehensive video network management system, Polycom CMA Desktop, a highly scalable, cost-effective solution for PC-based desktop video conferencing, and the Polycom Video Border Proxy™ (VBP™) line of network-aware firewall traversal systems, which work in conjunction with existing firewall infrastructure to allow seamless and secure video calling between networks. The standards-based offering delivers powerful, high-quality visual communication capabilities, including the ability to share video, audio and content from medical devices, and features seamless interoperability with other standards-based telehealth, telepresence and video conferencing solutions.
The new solution helps organizations like the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN) significantly expand their existing capabilities to address growing demand. OTN is a service provider for hospitals and health clinics throughout the Ontario province and operates one of the largest, most active telehealth networks in the world. The network includes more than 1,500 video systems and OTN estimates it facilitated more than 53,000 clinical consultations and more than 12,000 education and training events in 2008.
"Demand for telehealth services in Ontario is outstripping supply even with our growth rates of between 20 to 40 percent a year," said Ron Riesenbach, vice president of emerging business, OTN. "There are approximately 150,000 healthcare professionals in the province. We service several thousand of them, but we have many more thousands yet to connect. To date, providing greater access has been time consuming. Deployments require a lot of coordination and onsite delivery to install the video systems, the networks and the routers needed to access our VPN overlay network."
"The Polycom solution helps address the scalability, cost and network issues by allowing us to more easily provision secure, high-quality personal telehealth capabilities to users and clinics outside of our VPN overlay network," added Riesenbach. "With this new technology, we are starting to enable new sites with telehealth capabilities in less time and at a reduced cost."
In addition to enabling secure and easy communication between the private OTN network and public networks, the Polycom solution also features unique quality of service (QoS) technology that ensures a more consistent, high-quality experience for users on public networks that are often susceptible to network congestion and packet loss. Polycom Lost Packet Recovery™ (LPR™) is a forward error correction technology that helps minimize the impact of network congestion and packet loss, dramatically improving the quality of experience (video and audio) for users. Polycom LPR is featured across Polycom visual communication solutions from endpoints to infrastructure systems and is beneficial in calls with non-Polycom systems.