MGH's telestroke program selects Vidyo healthcare solution for video conferencing

Apr 28 2011

Vidyo®, Inc., the first company to deliver personal telepresence, today announced that the Partners Healthcare Telestroke Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) - supporting 27 hospitals throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine -- has deployed a revolutionary telemedicine communication and collaboration solution based on the company's award-winning platform. The Vidyo telehealth solution will be used for video conferencing and sharing data to enable specialists from MGH to examine patients at remote hospitals miles away to diagnose and recommend treatments. MGH selected Vidyo for the next stage of its telestroke program.

The Vidyo Healthcare Solution - A Quantum Leap Forward

"We were looking for a telemedicine solution with very specific features and benefits," said Dr. Lee Schwamm, M.D., Director of the Partners Telestroke Center in Boston, and Vice Chairman, Dept. of Neurology/Director of Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital. "The system had to work well, even with suboptimal network quality and also needed to be portable and flexible to allow us to work at a variety of different facilities, to expand our outpatient follow-up, non-acute care and provider-to-provider communications."

MGH needed Vidyo to be interoperable with installed video conferencing systems at other hospitals outside of the MGH corporate network. The team also tested the Vidyo platform with the hospitals' firewall configurations, "as-is," to make sure the Vidyo platform would function with little or no support from IT people. They required that Vidyo be very adaptable to every environment with very little 'tweaking' from their IT group and that it deliver extremely natural, clear video fidelity. "When we conduct acute care stroke exams, video clarity is mandatory so that we can observe any subtleties of patient's muscle movement and speech and detect problems; we need to clearly see the pupils in a patient's eyes," said Dr. Schwamm.

"The barriers to high quality, affordable telemedicine have traditionally been high," said Ofer Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of Vidyo. "Vidyo delivers a breakthrough solution that requires little to no administrative or technical help to deploy, use and maintain. We deliver over 'best effort networks' like the Internet, which opens up access to many more practitioners and patients in rural and under-served communities where care is most needed. MGH is demonstrating how Vidyo is positively changing the telehealth market, opening it up so that high-quality, affordable video communication is within reach to all providers. Vidyo offers MGH a quantum leap forward in image quality and temporal resolution when operating over any bandwidth, especially lower bandwidth. Of all telehealth options available, only Vidyo can achieve this. Vidyo enables more practitioners to become telemedicine providers, which is good news for patients and the healthcare industry."