NEW YORK, July 5, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CIOs in the
healthcare field are finding themselves in a unique and evolving
position as their organizations work to provide medical care to
more people while keeping costs and personnel in check. As a
result, according to Logicalis Healthcare Solutions, the
healthcare-focused arm of Logicalis US, an international IT
solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com),
telehealth is becoming one of the most talked about IT solutions in
the healthcare industry today. In addition to offering an
alternative to routine in-office physician visits, through properly
implemented telehealth solutions, hospitals can provide urgent
expert or specialty care. This can include, for example, help for
stroke or burn victims, even when a local specialist is
unavailable. Telehealth can also help physicians reach people in
remote or rural areas who may not be able to travel to a particular
facility or specialist as well as those in more densely populated
urban areas who find inner-city mass transit insufficient for their
needs. Logicalis' telehealth experts say one important key is
to select a medical-grade unified communications network that will
enable the quality of service necessary to allow a telehealth visit
to look and feel nearly identical to a face-to-face in-office
appointment.
"A medical-grade network offers users the kind of
industry-specific framework necessary to deliver an experience that
truly mimics an in-office appointment," says Cory Rehfeldt, Director of the Collaboration
Practice at Logicalis US. "When you have the right telehealth
solution, it's transformative. We've installed some Cisco
telehealth solutions, for example, that have given our healthcare
clients unprecedented interoperability – something you absolutely
need if you are connecting with users in a variety of environments.
To do telehealth right, you have to master the idea of
communicating clearly with patients from wherever they are, at any
time of day or night, and on any device they have available while
still maintaining a quality of service that makes them feel like
they're there in person. It's also critical to consider what
integrating the right collaboration tools can mean to the workflow
of a busy hospital or doctor's office; without 'presence
awareness,' for example, you don't know who is on call and
available to talk with patients via telehealth. When you have
unified communications tools purpose-built into a customized
telehealth solution, you can manage people, processes and costs
much more effectively than you ever imagined."
"There are a number of vendors bringing telehealth solutions to
market today, so for CIOs considering a telehealth implementation,
it's important to find a solution provider partner that is
knowledgeable in all aspects of telehealth, not just the solution
software," says Kim Garriott,
Principal Consultant, Healthcare Strategies, Logicalis Healthcare
Solutions. "They need a partner that understands both their
business requirements as well as the many technology options
available, and they need one that has the technical expertise and
certifications to enable the design of a custom solution to meet
the organization's specific needs."
Four Things to Consider Before Implementing a Telehealth
Solution
To implement the kind of telehealth solution that
both clinicians and patients will trust and use takes a lot of
up-front planning. To help, the experts at Logicalis
Healthcare Solutions have identified four key considerations every
healthcare CIO should consider before putting telehealth into
practice.
- Quality of Experience: The success or failure of a
telehealth solution is solely determined by patients' willingness
to use it. How closely the experience mimics previous in-person
visits will depend largely on the quality of the service, an area
where a medical-grade network ready for anywhere-anytime-any device
communication plays an important role.
- Clinician Workflow: Doctors, nurses and other clinicians
are busy people, and for them to fit telehealth appointments into
their traditional workflow means CIOs have to give them a helping
hand; one way is to design a solution that incorporates unified
communications tools like "presence awareness" into the solution to
make it easy and intuitive to use as well as scalable as
telehealth's popularity grows.
- Network Resiliency and Security: From an IT perspective,
telehealth takes things to a whole new level; with telehealth,
healthcare organizations are combining video, data and voice in
both wired and wireless formats, yet they must maintain the same
levels of security and always-on availability that they provide for
their data-only networks. While telehealth does add a new dimension
of complexity, however, its advantages far outweigh these concerns.
Bringing in a healthcare-focused solution provider partner gives
CIOs a trusted advisor to help them design a secure, resilient
telehealth solution and to manage it if those resources are not
part of the organization's IT team.
- Endpoint Flexibility: This is where a deep knowledge of
the ever-changing telehealth IT vendor landscape really pays
off. Some telehealth solutions, for example, can only
communicate with a proprietary end-user device, while others are
more flexible and can easily adapt to a wide array of devices. If
the solution is intended for hospital-to-hospital use, a single
endpoint may be fine; if the solution is intended to communicate
with patients in their home environments or clinicians outside the
organization, however, a more flexible solution is required.
Want to Learn More?
- There are no shortcuts on the road to telehealth; download a
Logicalis Healthcare Solutions white paper, "How to Design and
Implement a Successful Telehealth Program," to learn more:
http://ow.ly/BVsa301C5uk.
- Find out why the success of your telehealth solution involves
much more than just technology: http://ow.ly/vaaE301C5El.
- Read all about telehealth on the Logicalis Healthcare Solutions
website, then scan the latest healthcare IT news from Logicalis
Healthcare Solutions here: http://ow.ly/sQEm301C5gv.
About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international IT
solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge
and expertise in communications and collaboration; data center and
cloud services; and managed services.
Logicalis employs over 4,000 people worldwide, including highly
trained service specialists who design, deploy and manage complex
IT infrastructures to meet the needs of over 6,500 corporate and
public sector customers. To achieve this, Logicalis maintains
strong partnerships with technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM,
EMC, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow on an international
basis. It has specialized solutions for enterprise and medium-sized
companies in vertical markets covering financial services, TMT
(telecommunications, media and technology), education, healthcare,
retail, government, manufacturing and professional services,
helping customers benefit from cutting-edge technologies in a
cost-effective way.
The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1.5 billion from operations in Europe, North
America, Latin America and
Asia Pacific and is one of the
leading IT and communications solution integrators specializing in
the areas of advanced technologies and services.
The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on
the Johannesburg and London AIM
Stock Exchanges, with revenues of over $6
billion.
For more information, visit www.us.logicalis.com.
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Media contacts:
Nickie
Peters, Director of Marketing,
Logicalis US
nickie.peters@us.logicalis.com
920-338-7622
www.us.logicalis.com
Karen Franse, Communication
Strategy Group for Logicalis
US
kfranse@gocsg.com
866-997-2424
www.gocsg.com
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SOURCE Logicalis US