Unified Communications: The Next BIG Thing in Healthcare

re: Unified Communications: The Next BIG Thing in Healthcare

Renee Salmen — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:27:18 GMT

I agree! Great article.

There's Yugma, a web colloraboration tool perfect for the Health Industry.

I’m Renee’ from Yugma (pronounced “yoog-ma”; Sanskrit word meaning "together"). Yugma is truly a interactive web collaboration service. You get real time desktop sharing, annotation, whiteboarding, change presenters, and it works great on both Mac and Windows (Linux coming soon).

Considering the high cost of many solutions, Yugma will be a great alternative for many people around the world.

Try a demo and you will see.

All the best,

Renee'

http://www.yugma.com

re: Unified Communications: The Next BIG Thing in Healthcare

hlthblog — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:36:20 GMT

While I personally hope readers will want to use Microsoft Live Meeting :) for secure and enterprise-ready web conferencing, I'm encouraged by the number of hits on this topic. The future for unified communication technologies in the provision health information and certain kinds of medical services to consumers/patients wherever they might be, not to mention its use for training and e-learning, is astounding. Thanks for weighing in.

Bill Crounse, MD

re: Unified Communications: The Next BIG Thing in Healthcare

chiro — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 20:39:00 GMT

Very important article, Dr. Crounse.

Communication isn’t the only thing, it is everything. This is especially true in the health field, where life and death, sickness and health, can be contingent on communication or lack of it. Whether it is the emergency room of a hospital, or a simple patient encounter in the office, communication is paramount.

re: Unified Communications: The Next BIG Thing in Healthcare

lunakizz — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:32:25 GMT

Very important article, Dr. Crounse.

And I just confused now!

Our doctor makes housecalls

Richard Sprague WebLog — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 01:33:14 GMT

Reason # 6,384,289,121 to work at Microsoft: our healthcare includes free home visits by a doctor . We

Extending and coordinating care with Unified Communication: The next wave is here

HealthBlog — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:20:22 GMT

Ten years ago I co-founded a company with the aim to provide web-based medical information, secure messaging

re: Unified Communications: The Next BIG Thing in Healthcare

Tibor Duliskovich dr. — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:55:20 GMT

Dear Dr. Crounse, thank you for this glimpse into future. Communication is indeed very important, especially in healthcare, but there are two factors that detrimentally affect it - lack of standards and legal issues. Let me start with the later one - I believe there always be legal restrictions what can and cannot be done across the borders, what kind of service can be provided. This boils down to medical liability. So teleradiology, consultations, remote services will be restricted not due to technology, but due to legal framework. The technology also has its own problems - lack of globally agreed standards. To maintain contact with my professional network I have to run five different IM clients on my PC, all with slightly different functionality. Not only this is a nightmare for IT support, but it clearly is not acceptable in clinical environment. Many of these clients can be launched from multiple machines simultaneously, so you never know where your messages go, who sees them, why the user is not answering a call when he seemingly is on line, etc. I wish there was one common standard that all IMs support by default. Please do something about it!

re: Unified Communications: The Next BIG Thing in Healthcare

hlthblog — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:01:01 GMT

Tibor,

Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom. You are correct, most of the issues holding back wider adoption of unified communications technologies in health and healthcare are related to regulatory compliance issues and reimbursement issues rather than technology. Yes, there are still issues around proprietary communication standards but things are moving in the right direction. Our Office Communicator and MSN messenger show on-line presence from other on-line messaging systems. I believe this trend will continue.

Bill Crounse, MD

Picture This! Unified Communications in Healthcare

HealthBlog — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:05:54 GMT

If you search the term "unified communications" on this Blog, you'll see that it is a frequent topic.