Telemedicine applications clear time and distance barriers easily - Company Business and Marketing

Health Management Technology, Nov, 1996 by Lindsay Smith

Across America and around the world, specialized telemedicine applications are helping to eliminate barriers to a wide range of professional healthcare benefits.

Time is no longer a consideration. Distances easily are overcome. And, depending on your budget, costs are manageable, no longer an insurmountable obstacle to exploring telemedicine's many applications. Benefits are tangible, cost savings often quantifiable.

Applications abound: dozens of telemedicine situations, distance learning or continuing medical education (CME), telepsychiatry, teleconferencing and others. Systems and their applications reside on physicians' desktops, in operating suites, on the Internet and inside clinics within correctional facilities.

While competition is keen in the healthcare market, several companies have a lock on their customers.

Compression Labs Inc. of San Jose, Calif., undoubtedly has the largest telemedicine application in the U.S. specializing in medical care for prison inmates. It is in use at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

PictureTel Corp. of Danvers, Mass. claims a captive clientele on their system which electronically links prisoners at the Waupun Correctional Facility in Wisconsin with the offices of 10 medical specialists.

And Austin, Texas-headquartered VTEL has a system in use between facilities at the Ohio State University Medical Center and the Ohio State Department of Corrections.

While these firms seem to have a head start on their competitors, this emerging market is attracting new entrants.

Apple Computer

Apple Computer has been quiet in the desktop videoconferencing market lately. But according to Steve Jungmann, product marketing manager-QuickTime Conferencing, for the past year Apple has been developing and improving its QuickTime Conferencing (QTC) technology as this fast-moving market moves ahead.

Jungmann says that QuickTime Conferencing is a strong basis for user solutions today, and is poised to be a standard video conferencing and collaboration enabler in the near future.

The reason that QTC technology is so powerful is that it is entirely extensible and scalable, Jungmann says. Since it is designed with Apple's industry-standard QuickTime, all of the advantages that developers and users have today with QuickTime also apply to QuickTime Conferencing.

Chris Collins, network manager for the Neurological Institute of George Washington University Medical Center, supports QTC.

Using mostly Apple Power Macintosh computers, GWU's Neurological Institute created a wide-area medical image transport system known as NetroScan, as well as a real-time system to broadcast intraoperative images, using QTC.

NetroScan has established the GWU Neurological Institute as being on the cutting edge of technology, Collins says. The solution allows faculty members to observe surgery from their desks, homes or wherever they are. To preserve confidentiality, physicians communicate by telephone with assisting physicians, rather than use the two-way conferencing capability of QuickTime Conferencing.

"The best part," he adds, "is that it cost very little to implement. This solution saved us at least $20,000 and six months development time compared with closed circuit television. Then figure another $15,000 saved on individual printers, and dozens of modems and fax machines, which have been replaced by the network."

Another QTC user is Dr. Steven Erde, director of the Office of Academic Computing at Cornell University Medical College. He says, "We have developed a telepathology system here as well as a distance learning system. The telepathology system is a combination of a pathology work station as well as a remote consulting system, taking advantage of videoconferencing over the Internet."

Dr. Erde notes that the first generation was based on CU-See-Me, an application developed at Cornell University and currently one of the most widely used videoconferencing software on the Internet.

"The second generation, which we just started distributing, uses QTC as the transport," Dr. Erde says. "It's a more unified system. It allows you to send along high-resolution images, patient material, brief clinical histories and encapsulated medical records... I think that Internet-based telemedicine is really the future."

Apple also has announced QuickTime Conferencing for Windows, which will be available later this year. Analogous to QuickTime for Windows, developers and users will be able to leverage QTC's interoperability between Windows and Macintosh systems.

Jungmann points out that QuickTime Conferencing is a "developer" product. "We're in the desktop enabling piece of the business," he says. Apple has formed partnerships with a number of developers of key technologies as well as conferencing solution providers in order to enable truly cross-platform standards-based videoconferencing and collaboration.

Apple is poised to be a provider of video conferencing and collaboration technologies and solutions, he says.

"With the QuickTime Conferencing, QuickTime Conferencing for Windows technologies and partnership agreements, Apple has set a clear direction for its developers and customers to follow," he says. "As networks and protocols evolve, so will QuickTime Conferencing, giving users all the benefits that they expect from Apple products and technologies: compatibility, ease of use and superior performance."