Cisco TELEPRESENCE BROCHURE

Cisco TelePresence for Healthcare:
Improving the Quality and Speed of Care

Brochure

Executive Summary

Organizations dedicated to improving healthcare rely on collaboration and innovation to help them

meet productivity and economic challenges. Whether it is a pharmaceutical company seeking to

accelerate drug discovery or a hospital needing to maximize the productivity of its specialists, the

ability to bring people together with each other – and with information – is integral to achieving their

goals. Cisco TelePresence™ helps healthcare organizations:

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Strengthen clinical collaboration cost-effectively

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Enable virtual care team consultation

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Manage distributed operations

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Scale scarce resources and reduce travel costs

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Expand access to care

Introduction

Finding ways to manage rapidly escalating costs, accelerate innovation, deliver high-quality care,

and maximize use of skilled resources is particularly important for healthcare organizations.

Demand for healthcare is growing rapidly, and organizations dedicated to delivering quality

healthcare services find themselves managing a dispersed care environment. They need better

access to primary and specialized care resources. And they must manage growing complexity in

their clinical, operations, and regulatory environments. Improving collaboration brings people

together with information and expertise to meet these challenges.

Growing Need for Internal Collaboration

Healthcare professionals, including physicians, residents, nurses, and staff must complete training

throughout the year to maintain licenses. Completing this training takes time away from patients

and often involves costly travel. Many forms of remote or online training are inadequate because

they do not facilitate appropriate interaction. Collaboration with specialists, such as tumor boards,

usually requires physicians to travel from a surrounding area and lose time with their patients. At

© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 4

Brochure

the same time, where physicians are unavailable, other staff and operations personnel also

experience reduced productivity.

Collaborative Consultations Becoming Standard

Healthcare increasingly relies on collaborative consultations for everything from research to patient

referrals, specialist consultations, and delivering care to remote areas. However, increasing

demand makes it almost impossible for a limited number of specialists to meet the growing need.

Patients may have to travel to a distant place for care they need. Hospitals may have to divert

patients to competing facilities, resulting in lost revenues and lower patient satisfaction.

Operations Becoming Geographically Dispersed

Healthcare organizations face the growing complexity of managing thousands of employees in

multiple sites and collaborating on standard treatment protocols and workflows. Traditionally,

healthcare executives have had to travel extensively to provide executive leadership across regions

and facilities, which can be costly and reduces their productivity.

Shortage of Medical Resources

Patients living in remote or underserved areas might have reduced access to quality healthcare –

even basic care from a primary physician. Additionally, specialists, such as radiologists, cardiology

specialists, and nuclear medicine experts, are increasingly in short supply. At many organizations,

they travel between facilities to consult with multiple medical teams, losing valuable time and

productivity. As healthcare organizations seek to meet growing patient demand, they face the dual

challenge of expanding access to care while scaling a finite pool of skilled professionals and

specialized expertise to cover a growing patient population.

Cisco TelePresence for Healthcare

Meeting these challenges requires collaboration among essential caregivers in treatment pathways,

which is why many healthcare organizations are focusing on collaboration initiatives. Today, Cisco

TelePresence for Healthcare can help you improve the business and clinical workflows that deliver

the most powerful impacts – those that rely on people, information, and expertise.

Cisco TelePresence creates immersive, in-person meeting experiences among geographically

dispersed users – over the network. Integrated visual, audio and video components deliver the

characteristics of a face-to-face meeting, creating a lifelike collaboration experience with:

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Smooth and realistic motion

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Accurate color replication

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An apparent eye-to-eye viewpoint

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Superb and accurate sound rendering, synchronized with the images presented

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Hours of interaction without user fatigue

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Life-sized user representation

By enabling executives, physicians, specialists, patients, and suppliers to meet, discuss, and make

decisions in real time, regardless of their locations, you can help them reduce the inefficiencies of

traditional collaboration tools. Cisco TelePresence also reduces the need for frequent travel,

enabling people to accomplish more in the same amount of time – without the stress and fatigue

associated with travel. You gain the ability to effectively interact with virtual teams all over the world

and manage these interactions in real time.

© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2 of 4