Today we had a great experience consistent with all the principles of Virtual Care, which is exemplified by NowDox. Herb Rogove, D.O. a physician in California with a special expertise in Telemedicine needed to setup an interview with a clinician in Bangalore, India who had some similar interests in Telemedicine for the ICU setting. They were not sure what the bandwidth situation might be on one end and were able to plan this a few days in advance. As a member of the NowDox community, he contacted the NowDox Virtual Care support team with the email address of his counterpart in India.
A GoToMeeting (HDFaces beta) was setup because of this instance, with uncertainty of bandwidth and the need to make sure one could seamlessly connect into the video session by standard phone call if needed, but in a seamless manner. A meeting link was sent out a few days in advance, a google calendar invite was attached and all 3 confirmed they would attend.
At the time of the meeting, 2 people dropped in and appeared, but we heard on the phone the person in Bangalore had a delay in getting to the meeting. Therefore, Citrix GoToAssist was used at the same time by the NowDox support team, a link sent by email and Google Talk to the attendee, and instant secure screen-share support session enabled the NowDox virtual care support to take over the remote PC, all with the users permission and observation…and make sure the correct meeting ID was used, etc. A quick bandwidth test was done thru this virtual desktop support, and within 5 minutes the final visitor was in the GoToMeeting HDFaces session.
The Virtual Care support team member, also a clinician, confirmed everyone was all set, handed over the meeting organizer controls to Dr Rogove in California who setup the interview, and the rest of their meeting proceeded. The support team person then turned off their own webcam, while the others remained active, put themselves on mute and the attendees emailed him back an hour later letting them know the meeting went perfectly,they had a face-to-face discussion supplemented by a normal phone conversation without delay, and thanked the virtual care team for the outcome.
My whole approach to virtual care, as is the mission of NowDox (a community I co-founded and actively support) is that we are not about the “technology” but about the workflow process. We love GoToMeeting’s HDFaces product (in beta till June) for its practicality in enabling this type of session. We also actively use Vidyo for “personal virtual consult rooms” as another valuable workflow paradigm, and we love GoToAssist as another “tool in the holster” to help troubleshoot without wasting peoples time. In short, virtual care is about finding the right tools to get the job done, and it is about the service and community that figures out what to leverage, with whom, where, when and how.
Another problem solved! Great partners with great tools and a support process in the middle that is technology agnostic, but finds the best things out there!
AJBMD
