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.
