Vidyo, Inc. and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) are partnering to add Vidyo’s visual communications to ANTHC’s existing statewide telehealth network called AFHCAN. ANTHC encompasses every city and village in Alaska, serving the majority of the state’s population through the AFHCAN telehealth program.
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 health facilities, community health and research, and IT.
AFHCAN is an FDA listed medical device manufacturer providing telehealth products and services that offer a diagnostic store-and-forward platform with the ability to create a telehealth case containing textual information, forms, and data from biomedical peripherals enabling cases to be sent for consultation.
Healthcare professionals are able to view the data and respond to the case using a standard PC workstation or mobile platform. AFHCAN is able to provide telehealth services to the Alaska Tribal Health System, partners, Indian Health Services, and commercial customers.
Alaska is home to 700,000 people who are spread 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 that makes connectivity and communication huge challenges
Since being deployed statewide more than a decade ago, AFHCAN’s “tConsult” has expanded well beyond its initial concept of improving primary care workflows by providing specialty clinic referrals, post-discharge continuity of care, and billing.
By integrating Vidyo’s Application Programming Interfaces (API) with AFHCAN’s existing “tConsult” software-based system, thousands of Alaska healthcare practitioners are now going to be able to conduct real-time high definition video consultations and examinations with hundreds of thousands of patients in more than 200 locations. The system will be interoperable to perform seamlessly over all devices such as PCs, Macs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and also work with older legacy equipment.
“The implementation of Vidyo has given us the ability to change the way we provide healthcare in rural Alaska,” said Dr. Stewart Ferguson, CIO for 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 is always 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, and sea cables.”
“We are extremely impressed by how well ANTHC tackles the challenge of serving such a geographically dispersed population with high-quality healthcare,” 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 integration of Vidyo with the AFHCAN “tConsult” system was demonstrated at the ATA Conference that took place May 4-8 in Austin Texas. For more information, go to www.vidyo.com or follow @vidyo on Twitter.