At the 2012 American Telemedicine Association’s conference, videoconferencing company Polycom will be demonstrating is health care solution, which in addition to providing the interaction between clinician and patient, has the ability to integrate medical devices with its current RealPresence Platform. The platform acts as a backbone for the rest of the company’s offerings.

The RealPresence Platform offers universal video collaboration, video resource management, access and security, virtualization for scability and video content management.

Source: Polycom.com

Using industry standards, medical peripheral devices on the patient side can send data through the Polycom system to the clinician. Polycom has practitioner carts specifically made for telehealth applications that offer real-time video interaction. “Medical devices, especially scopes such as an otoscope and a [digital in-band] stethoscope can be attached to these carts and used,” says Ron Emerson, director of Global Healthcare Marketing for Polycom in an interview.

At the show, the company will be demonstrating its RealPresence Media Manager, which allows the archival of video. Health care organizations can use this product to archive training sessions, clinical reviews, consultations and collaborative meetings, the company said in a statement.

The Virtualization Manager, which is part of the RealPresence Platform, will be shown. The company says the product is designed to scale services to video telehealth networks by offering an auto-failover to ensure call availability, lowest cost, call distribution and routing and simplified user access with a single dialing plan, even when connecting across networks. It can handle 25,000 concurrent sessions and 75,000 device registrations on up to 64 video servers.

“As health care organizations become larger and you have larger deployments, what we find is that you do not often have centralized technology,” says Emerson. “You might have an international health care system and you might have a video bridge in the U.S. and you might have one in the U.K. The question is do you have to manage each one of those by themselves?”

What [the virtualization manager] does is combine all those different resources and control them through one cental portal, he says.

RealPresence Mobile will be showcased. The enterprise level application for tablets and smartphones means practioners have access to conversations away from their offices.

SpectraLink Wireless Wi-Fi Headsets that feature a 2D barcode scanner will also be shown. The idea behind this product is that nurses can scan patient wristbands, charts and bottles, capturing medical records electronically.

About the author

Lisa Nadile - Managing Editor

Lisa Nadile is Managing Editor for TechDecisions. She has been a technology journalist for over twenty years and has never lost her love of technology and the way it changes (and improves) our lives. She has written for many magazines and websites on the development of computers and the Internet, and is enjoying her new mission in the audiovisual sector.