Health care workers serving residents in rural areas of New Mexico, as well as the state prison system, can now deliver improved care to patients with common, treatable illnesses, thanks to the fact that the University of New Mexico's Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (Project ECHO) is now using telepresence solutions from Polycom.

Project ECHO is a telemedicine program run by the university that provides critical information to doctors working in rural parts of the state as well as in the state prison system. These doctors can get information regarding the treatment of common illnesses such as hepatitis C, which is widespread in the state of New Mexico.

 

Using Polycom (News - Alert) telepresence, these healthcare workers can communicate “live” via with university healthcare specialists who provide them with important information regarding patient care and treatment. Daily video conferences allow for healthcare education that combines both face-to-face communication with interactive content and the ability to stream, record and rebroadcast the information on-demand. This means that a practitioner can not only sit in on a live video discussion of a pathology or treatment plan, but also can view the recorded educational session at a later date if they need to review.

 

In a release, program founder Sanjeev Arora, M.D., said Polycom’s visual communication solutions “provided a way to extend my knowledge to healthcare providers around the state in an efficient and cost-effective way.” He said the telepresence program enables him to conduct weekly training sessions with healthcare providers around the state that may not otherwise have access to expertise.

“We train primary care providers within our network, and in turn, they use their knowledge to more effectively treat patients in their local communities,” he said. “It's a win-win situation because they learn to become experts in their field while also using that knowledge to immediately improve patient care."

Currently Project ECHO is using more than 40 Polycom VSX video conferencing systems and a Polycom RMX 2000 real-time media conferencing platform for multi-site conferences.

The Polycom RSS 2000 recording and streaming server and the Polycom Video Media Center (VMC) 1000 video content management solution facilitate the recording and on-demand streaming capabilities.

The team at Project ECHO also recently added the Polycom Converged Management Application (CMA) 5000, a desktop video conferencing system, to simplify the provisioning and management of visual communication solutions across the entire Project ECHO network. Using CMA Desktop, practitioners are able to see live video training sessions from anywhere over a VPN connection.

Wesley Pak, systems and programming manager for Project ECHO, said they are considering extending the project to other states.

 

"Currently, we are working with the state of Washington to implement a similar telemedicine program for their underserved communities, and it's the Polycom solution that makes it all possible," he said.

Pak said he chose Polycom because it offers a complete, integrated solution and because Polycom systems are based on open standards.

"There is tremendous value in our ability to stream, record and manage our video content as part of the program," added Pak. "It allows us to extend our resources to broader audiences by turning real-time events into repeatable, educational content."

Founded in 2002, Project ECHO was launched to help doctors treat diseases that are common yet complex to manage. Some of these illnesses, such as Hep C, require evolving types of treatment.

Initially the program focused on hepatitis C, but it was so successful that it has since been expanded to cover cardiovascular risk reduction, childhood obesity, pediatrics, telepsychiatry, chronic pain, high-risk pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, integrated addiction/psychiatry, psychotherapy, pulmonary diseases and rheumatology.

“To date, we have enrolled more than 3,000 patients in our Hepatitis C disease management program,” Arora said. “Without Project ECHO, these patients would not have had access to treatment for their condition.”

Polycom made news on TMCnet earlier today when it announced that it was teaming up with Cisco Systems Inc. and Intel (News - Alert) to create the first-ever virtual classroom in Turkey.