We had an experience in which a new type of panel discussion needed to take place as part of a monthly meeting that is hosted by a prominent healthcare law firm. While an existing traditional video conferencing system was in place to connect their two offices when needed, in this case we needed to make sure a very busy family medicine clinician in another location could easily drop into such a session and be an active member of a panel discussion. He also needed to present an outline of how he had leverage various technologies to help transform his practice.
So we had the audio visual team just get a standard laptop on both ends, standard web cams, and let people connect by phone or computer microphone, did not matter. We were able to have a 3 way highly interactive panel discussion and bypass the traditional obstacles of technology complexity with a process that did not require any special configurations on either end.
The same processes and tools that enable Virtual Care really apply to the generic issues of collaboration between people. In this particular situation we used GoToMeeting because the meeting was more of a “managed by organizer” model in which controls/presenter status were handed back and forth. There was also high probability that some would be using VOIP and others telephone, but we needed all to have the same experience regardless.
The meeting went very well….but once again it is because the technology did not drive the event, it moved seamlessly to the background and we could focus on just talking, sharing and collaborating.
