Vidyo and Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium Partner to Enhance Statewide Medical Network with Vidyo Communications

Vidyo-Powered Solution Will Visually Connect over 200 Sites and 2500 Healthcare Providers Across all Regions of Alaska
American Telemedicine Association (ATA) Conference – May 6, 2013 –Vidyo, Inc. and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) today announced that they have partnered to add Vidyo’s visual communications and collaboration capabilities to ANTHC’s existing statewide telehealth network — AFHCAN.  By integrating Vidyo’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) with AFHCAN’s existing tConsult software-based system, thousands of Alaska health care practitioners will have the ability to conduct real-time, high-definition video consultations and examinations with hundreds of thousands of patients in more than 200 locations.

“The implementation of Vidyo has given us the ability to change the way we provide health care in rural Alaska,” said Dr. Stewart Ferguson, CIO, ANTHC. “The AFHCAN Telehealth program has more than 1,500 active providers in its network at any one time, with an average of 500 new providers each year. There’s a daily challenge of how best to reach out and connect with more than 200 sites scattered over 37 autonomous organizations at the end of land lines, satellite links, microwave towers, sea cables, you name it. For our complex world, we needed something that just works, period. That’s Vidyo.”

ANTHC/AFHCAN

ANTHC encompasses every city and village in the state of Alaska serving the majority of the state’s population through the AFHCAN telehealth program. Alaska is home to 700,000 people who are spread out over 660,000 square miles. This creates a challenging technology landscape that mixes satellite connectivity, high bandwidth, low bandwidth, high latency as well as terrestrial infrastructure, which all make connectivity and communication huge challenges.

Since being deployed statewide more than a decade ago, tConsult has vastly improved health care delivery in remote regions of Alaska. It has also expanded well beyond its initial concept of improving primary care workflows like specialty clinic referral, post-discharge continuity of care, and billing. Now Vidyo capabilities will be a core part of the system. Vidyo’s rich APIs enabled easy integration with AFHCAN’s tConsult solution to deliver the most cost-effective, scalable high-quality video via standard IP networks.  The Vidyo solution is extremely interoperable so that it performs seamlessly over all devices: PCs, Macs, laptops, tablets, smartphone and also with older, legacy equipment.

“We are extremely impressed by how well ANTHC tackles the challenge of serving such a geographically dispersed population with high-quality health care,” said Ofer Shapiro, Vidyo’s CEO and co-founder. “For ANTHC doctors to directly assess a remote patient’s condition in an emergency situation, they need a reliable system that offers high visual acuity over unpredictable network conditions. The unequalled level of quality, performance and reliability that Vidyo offers makes this possible. The integration of Vidyo with AFHCAN’s existing software solution creates an extraordinarily powerful tool for assisting physicians and ultimately helps save lives.”

The integration of Vidyo with the tConsult system will be demonstrated at AFHCAN’s Booth #1242, at the ATA Conference taking place May 4-8, 2013 in Austin, Texas.  Vidyo will be showing a documentary on the ANTHC use case, as well as demonstrating other use cases of its telehealth solution at ATA Booth #616.

The Vidyo Difference for Healthcare

Vidyo provides a highly flexible software communication and collaboration platform that can be easily customized for healthcare needs and integrated into other healthcare solutions. The patented VidyoRouter™ architecture eliminates the MCU and offers unprecedented error resiliency, low latency rate matching thus enabling natural, affordable, high-quality video to work over the Internet, LTE and 4G networks.  Vidyo delivers end-to-end encryption, provides HIPAA-compliant security, and easily integrates into existing healthcare environments with support for a variety of medical devices and seamless interoperability with existing conferencing infrastructure. The Vidyo for Healthcare solution includes the industry’s richest and most versatile video collaboration platform with an API to video-enable third party medical applications and for easy integration into the medical workflow.

About Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium

ANTHC is a not‐for‐profit tribal health organization managed by Alaska Native Tribal governments and their regional health organizations. ANTHC provides statewide services in specialty medical care; construction of water, sanitation and health facilities; community health and research; information technology and professional recruiting. For more information, please visit www.anthc.org.

About AFHCAN

AFHCAN is an FDA listed medical device manufacturer providing telehealth products and services that empower organizations to improve health care delivery worldwide. AFHCAN offers a diagnostic store-and-forward platform with the ability to create a telehealth case containing textual information, forms and data from biomedical peripherals, and send the case for consultation. Health care professionals are able to view the data and respond to the case using a standard PC workstation or mobile platforms. AFHCAN provides an array of telehealth program services to its ATHS (Alaska Tribal Health System) partners, Indian Health Services and commercial customers.

About Vidyo, Inc.
Vidyo, Inc. pioneered Personal Telepresence enabling natural, HD multi-point videoconferences on tablets and smart phones, PCs and Macs, room systems, that interoperate with legacy H.323 and SIP endpoints, telepresence solutions and affordable cloud-based video conferencing as a service solution.  The VidyoWorks™ platform allows solution providers to integrate high quality visual communications into their applications, leveraging H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and Vidyo’s patented VidyoRouter™ technology. Learn more at www.vidyo.com, on the Blog or follow @vidyo on Twitter.

 

   

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