Vidyo and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) have partnered to enable thousands of Alaska healthcare practitioners to conduct real-time, high-definition video consultations and examinations with hundreds of thousands of patients in more than 200 locations.
“The implementation of Vidyo has given us the ability to change the way we provide healthcare in rural Alaska. The AFHCAN Telehealth program has more than 1,500 active providers in its network at any one time, with an average of 500 new providers each year. There’s a daily challenge of how best to reach out and connect with more than 200 sites scattered over 37 autonomous organizations at the end of land lines, satellite links, microwave towers, sea cables, you name it. For our complex world, we needed something that just works, period. That’s Vidyo.”
Dr. Stewart Ferguson
CIO
Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium
Automatic transcript:
practice of medicine is a lot different
here than it is in the lower 48 we have
a population of about 8,000 people
spread out in an area about the size of
the state of Indiana traveling patients
is a challenge many of the villages may
be several hundred miles from a
healthcare facility where travel is only
by either snow machine or dog sled or by
aircraft nothing is easy here as far as
providing medical care in the village
here it’s hard to fathom what it means
to get on a snow machine and ride 90
miles to get in and see patients if the
health aide was faced with a situation
that he or she didn’t understand that
patient was put on a plane and flown
into the regional healthcare facility
and it’s a very expensive proposition
the vision of the original Afghan model
was to create a statewide telehealth
system that would serve all federal
beneficiaries in Alaska we focus on your
disease we focus on cardiology trauma
wound management dermatology
telemedicine has been a lot for us here
we’ve always looked for a solution that
worked in a challenging technology
landscape where we have a mix of
satellite connectivity high bandwidth
low bandwidth late hi Layton sees as
well as terrestrial infrastructure our
application has historically been as a
storeroom forward application very
asynchronous and that’s a huge benefit
that video is bringing to the table is
to have that real-time communication
between the two parties we have about
one and a half thousand people that do
telehealth providers every year the do
telehealth on average there are 500 new
providers each year using or so
so that’s that’s a challenge because
those providers are not here in
Anchorage they’re out of the remote
regions so the system has to be simple
and easy to use with virtually no
training opportunities it must work and
it must provide the highest quality data
audio video that we can obtain it’s not
like communicating over a telephone or a
fax machine or writing a letter it’s
real it’s personal and in its immediate
the one thing that really drew us to
video is the fact that it simply works
it works consistently the video is
without power and just as importantly
the desktop sharing is beyond belief we
had a think 11 people connected on iPads
iPhones max pcs people coming in over
satellite we’d five people sharing your
desktop and we try to make it fail and
we couldn’t we live here on the
northwest coast of Alaska 33 miles above
the Arctic Circle so what man we can
deliver the health care just like they
do in downtown Boston Massachusetts our
providers are demanding solutions that
are based on live video for me to put
everybody in the same screen it’s
priceless we’ve proven that we’ve saved
in literally millions of dollars and
especially travel costs it provides
better care it saves money it prevents
the patient the inconvenience of
traveling to Kotzebue and I think is
important aspect of medical care that we
really want to be able to deliver and deliver well