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Telehealth services were a forced adoption during the COVID 19 pandemic in Australia however, it is now a permanent part of the Medicare system.

The head of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Omar Khorshid, calling it a “silver lining” that will “transform healthcare in this country for many, many years to come.”

A 2021 article on the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s website – “COVID-19: the next normal—strengthening the system for 2021 and beyond”  discussed how “During the COVID-19 pandemic, one area that has seen tremendous growth is digitisation. Meaning everything from telehealth to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve analysis and processing.” This includes the use of SMART Boards.

The Australian Government’s Digital Health website has a dedicated section on telehealth which provides information for both healthcare providers and consumers. The following information is from this site explains telehealth & its benefits.

What is Telehealth?

Telehealth consultations provide patients with a consultation through video or telephone instead of face to face.

It uses the transmission of images, voice and data between two or more sites using telecommunications to provide health services, such as clinical advice, consultation, education, and training services. There are three ways telehealth can be used:  

  1. Remote patient monitoring – monitoring patient health and clinical information at a distance.
  2. Store-and-forward – transmission of images or information from one healthcare provider to another.
  3. Consultations – connection between a patient and one or more healthcare providers through an audio or video-enabled device. 

Most practices in Australia tend to now use telehealth in consultations, particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why use Telehealth?

Healthcare when patients can’t leave home

If your patients are unwell or need to self-isolate, they can still attend a consultation via phone or video call – it’s not just convenient, it can also reduce the spread of illness.

Tending to patients in rural and remote regions

Occasionally, Australians living in rural and remote areas need to travel far to see their healthcare provider. Telehealth can allow patients to access vital medical services that may have been previously difficult to manage.

Telehealth is an additional aid to improving patient outcomes and can be used in conjunction with face-to-face care.

 

What are the benefits to Telehealth?

Healthcare provider benefits

  • Reduced travel, expense and time away from home
  • Higher patient reach, due to fewer location and travel barriers
  • Reduced patient ‘no-shows’
  • Real-time assistance with difficult cases and emergencies
  • Improved allocation of consulting rooms within a practice where there is limited availability
  • Opportunity for staff to work remotely
  • For professional development, such as informal knowledge transfer through increased collaboration, networking and case conferencing opportunities.

Patient benefits

  • Improved access to healthcare, i.e. greater equity
  • Reduced travel, expense and time away from home
  • Reduced waiting times supporting faster diagnosis and appropriate treatment
  • Improved continuity and quality of care
  • Local treatment from a known healthcare provider, under specialist supervision
  • Increased opportunity to contact their healthcare provider between face-to-face consults.

Practice manager benefits

  • Service delivery growth opportunities
  • Improved clinical workflows and increased practice efficiency, e.g. time savings
  • More cost-effective delivery of service through higher patient flow and time savings
  • Improved coordination of care and service integration.

“Healthcare anywhere – remote medicine and telehealth tech for today.”

Telehealth will never replace a face-to-face appointment with a doctor however, the adoption of technology has been successful in supporting patient’s care, effective in managing staff and training healthcare teams.

I thought I would share this video from SMART Technologies which explains how a SMART interactive whiteboard and other technologies can work together and provide a simple solution to improve patient care, deliver team training, staff management and more.

The video outlines the clinical applications of the SMART Solution along with how it can be utilised to improve medical training and support administration operations in a healthcare environment.

 

Click here to download the transcript of this video Healthcare anywhere

 

For more information on how SMART Boards can support best practice in healthcare please contact us on 1300 139 292

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TRANSCRIPT

My name is Nick Benoit from SMART technologies and I’m here to talk to you about healthcare anywhere, SMART solutions for remote medicine and telehealth. We’re also going to dig deep on a couple additional use cases, including training and the administrative operation of a SMART solution

Jumping right in. Let’s talk a little bit about the changing dynamic of medicine. Well, we know that this changing, the evolving nature of medicine requires that health. It strengthens the interaction between patients and healthcare providers. We know that within this changing healthcare environment, there’s a critical need for both remote health care, as well as local health care.

We know that there’s an increased emphasis on blended learning and professional development and training, especially now, as we cross into COVID territory around February of 2020, we’re now seeing an absolute necessity that. Organizations can implement their training, both again, remotely, as well as locally.

We’re seeing a new generation of healthcare workers that are driving the need to digitize traditional analogue use cases. So, all of these things in mind today during our webinar, we’re going to talk about the three primary applications. Of the SMART solution in healthcare. We’re going to talk about the clinical application of the SMART solution.

These includes remote medicine tele-health as well as patient management. We’re going to take a look at the SMART solution and medical training. So how can we ensure that we’re providing a high level of experience? Two trainees, whether they’re remotely located or whether they’re local. And then also we’re going to take a look at the SMART solution in administrative operations.

So again, this is about digitising those traditional applications that have been analogue. Let’s jump right in SMART solutions. And tele-health, let’s talk about what’s the value of collaboration, technology, and telehealth. It’s really about allowing remote access and supporting health equity. So this is about remote patients.

Those that might be geographically located far away from hospitals and unable to get access to care. How do we ensure that they’re actually able to get access to the best doctors and they’re able to get their ailments treated quickly and efficiently? This is about improving patient outcomes. So one of the things that SMART brings to the table is the ability to work effectively with content and visual, visual imagery.

It’s about improving the limited physician resources. So we know in large countries, such as Australia, Canada, Brazil, Russia, there’s actually a limited number of subject matter experts. Folks that are located in the country actually find it really difficult to get access to high quality of the care they need routinely. So collaboration technology does is it enables us to effectively work with those patients that might be geographically located.

It’s about increasing patient engagement and satisfaction. Again, ensuring that they’re getting the quality of care that they need. It’s ensuring that they’re able to interact with the doctors quickly, effectively, routinely, um, and ensuring that no loss of information when doing so we always talk about this concept of the tragedy of misinformation, and that really exists when there’s a misunderstanding between patient and doctor and caregiver.

So visual collaboration technology actually provides us the ability to reduce that tragedy of misinformation. And of course, this always comes back to patient convenience as well. In times of COVID, it’s actually pretty risky for patients to get outside of their homes, travel long distances, sit in the hospital to meet with their doctor.

It’s about keeping a close watch on their illnesses without putting them at further risk by asking them to go out into public. So, how does the solution enhance clinical collaboration? Well, we actually provide you the ability to work with any content type. What we mean by that is you can actually pick up a pen and write natively within an application.

I’ll show you that a little bit further. We also have the ability to integrate with all conferencing platforms. So HIPAA compliancy, like Microsoft teams and Skype for business, we actually. Integrate with these applications to ensure that not only are you being provided with that high quality audio and video experience, but we’re also able to support the content collaboration piece as well.

And the third piece, SMART podium SMART podium is a fantastic solution. Again, it’s designed to support the training, the adoption piece, but it’s also designed to support the remote collaboration with the doctor. Who’s set up in their office, able to interact with content in a meaningful way. And we’ll go through that a little bit further here as well.

One thing I want to show you really quickly is actually how the SMART solution enables you to work interactively with content. So here I brought up a picture of an MRI of a brain. So what I’m actually able to do here is zoom in with my two fingers, gesture support, the same way you would interact with content on your iPhone.

Pick up my pen and Mark up the specific area here. So as a patient, interacting with my doctor, as a doctor, interacting with my patient, you can see that there’s no ambiguity around which part of this content I’m actually interacting with. I have the ability to highlight it here. And then as I zoom out, you’ll notice that those annotations actually scale with that image.

Now I have the ability to save this file and it’s a native file format. Send that out to my patient and ensure that there’s no loss of information that they understand. The, the part of the MRI that’s in question that I was referring to and everyone is in alignment. That’s Smart’s value proposition. When it comes to working with different file types and content types. I have the ability to pick up my pen, start to ride and save natively to that file format specific to SMART. Let’s jump back in. What about the conferencing side of things? Well, we know that content collaboration is one aspect to remote collaboration, but we also know that audio and video is a huge part of that experience as well.

Smart actually plays. Nicely with all conferencing applications. If you notice here, we have the Microsoft team rooms SMART can actually be the front of room touch solution for that platform. We have a Zoom Room as well. Again, we integrate with that to provide you with an optimal experience. The Poly X50, if you wanted to do a side by side experience where you have content on one board video on the other we’ll support that as well.

Poly USB is another fantastic peripheral that SMART supports as well. Again, providing them with that audio video and content collaboration experience. Further to that. We have what we referred to as SMART teamwork, SMART Teamworks is designed to integrate with those conferencing platforms, but also bring this enhanced level of content collaboration to the table.

And I’ll run you through that in a little bit here. When we start to talk about training.

The podium, there’s really a couple of primary applications for that. Firstly, it enables the end user to work interactively with their content, from the comfort of their own office. All of the value that we had talked about earlier here, being able to pick up a pen and write natively within PowerPoint, PDF, other Microsoft office applications, web-based applications. That’s all consistent with the podium as well. In fact, if we take a look at this image here, your podium actually becomes your primary display while your laptop top becomes your secondary display. That enables you to essentially work from this information intensive environment and do so in an interactive way.

It’s a perfect complement to any remote web conferencing platform. Again, if you think about this from a training and learning perspective, you can actually be delivering a lesson from one to many from the comfort of your home office. Or further to that you could actually be in an auditorium space, whereas a subject matter, our expert, I’m actually pushing out my content highlighting specific pieces of my content.

And maybe even having that projected behind me on a large projection space, the podium is designed to really turn any space. That’s traditionally passive into a highly interactive space. Again, enabling the presenter or the subject matter expert to work in a meaningful way. With the content that they’re trying to present, it is ideal for tele-health remote workers and medical training as well.

It also brings in our activity into the doctor’s office. As I mentioned earlier, it’s truly easy to use, just like all SMART solutions. Some of its value is really based around the walk up and use experience. You pick up your pen and you start to write and it functions as you would expect it to. So, when we talked about the clinical applications of the SMART solution, we talked about twofold. It was really about remote medicine and tele-health, but we also talk about patient management as well. And if we take a look at the board here, it’s really the age-old process of actually having a dry erase board, maybe putting some magnets up on that board and updating that regularly.

Obviously, we know that this is absolutely vital to the day-to-day operations of any hospital, but we know that patient management, bed management, managing medications, all that is absolutely critical to ensuring seamless flow and patient care is optimal. Well, we actually have the ability to do here is.

Provide an optimised experience out of our SMART meeting pro software. So meeting pro is a digital white boarding software is essentially an infinite canvas that enables you to pick up a pen and write and working directly with actively with whatever content you pull into this space. So, the old way of managing patients, as we see here is really that traditional dry race board, right?

It’s about. Having some magnets over here, updating these daily, somebody then has to transcribe this note, this content, and it’s not really time effective. We know that evolution of that is actually being able to pick up and write onto a template here. That’s a little bit better, but it’s still a bit manual, but we actually have the ability to do over here is pull in a template. Any PNG file, any JPEG file we can actually upload to our gallery here.

And we have the ability to pull that content out as many times as we want, that’s relevant to our use case. So, what I’m going to do here is I pulled out my template and now I’m actually going to pull out multiple names as part of my patient management. So, I’m going to have him pull out Elise, going to pull out Jacob.

Pull out, Nick, all of this is customisable here and not only can I actually pull-out names, but I could also pull-out images. I can pull out specific medications. I can pull out what, any, whatever pictures that I customise on my gallery and interact with them in a meaningful way.

What’s also valuable about working with content in this way is that I can hyperlink my content to a living breathing document that may exist on the server somewhere. I can also go ahead and file. Say that as my content. Save it as a PDF, save it as a JPEG, other common file formats. Again, upload that to a central repository so that we have perpetual access to all of the content that we’ve worked on as a team.

Happy to do it, dig deeper into meeting pro. If there’s anyone out there that wants to have a one-on-one demonstration and really experienced the full capabilities of that software, it is your whiteboard on steroids. As you see here, it is an infinite canvas. That enables you to either go 10,000 foot or actually really drill in on a granular level that’s patient management. Well, let’s jump out and talk about training really quickly. Let’s see. Talk about the benefits of technology for training and medicine. When we know that it’s absolutely paramount for continuing medical education, that’s, you know, the rate of evolution, the rate of innovation rather in medicine is. It’s so mind blowing that doctors and nurses and subject matter experts are continually updating their medical knowledge.

Technology plays a huge role in that because it ensures that they can learn anywhere anyhow, from any device. It is absolutely critical to ensuring that all trainees have access to that content. We know that they’re requiring both local training as well as remote training. And we also know that. It’s the implementation of technology into teaching and learning into training actually fosters new way of new ways of interacting with content as well.

So, what I want to do here is I’m actually going to jump out of my PowerPoint really quickly and jump into Teamworks and show you how Teamworks as an application can be used to really enhance that teaching and learning or that training experience. Now, here we are in our SMART teamwork software SMART Teamworks is designed to provide the end user with the ability to one, touch the launch into any competent platform.

If you notice here, I walk up to my board and I’m presented with my calendar for the day. I can jump into my specific meeting and we’re off and running with an audio video and content collaboration. What I’m going to do here is just jump into my whiteboard. And this whiteboard becomes my central repository of all the content that, that I want to bring into a meeting.

Now, if we think about the typical training session in hospitals and with medical experts, they’re pulling in more than one piece of content. So, what I’m going to do here is go down to my little folder here with a plus sign, and I’m actually going to pull in different pieces of content. I’m going to pull in my neurological MRI.

I’ve got another MRI image here that I want to bring in. I’m actually going to bring in this budgetary forecast and I’m going to bring in a video as well. Now, each one of these documents actually has contextual ink and vector-based ink. So, what I mean by that, I can go ahead and double tap on this image.

Pick up my pen and highlight specific parts. Of these images when I send it back, those annotations actually scale with that document. And I continue to interact with them. Same idea with this, with our previous MRI image here, I can go ahead and bring that up and talk about that previous part of the MRI, the MRI that I had referenced earlier, send that back and the annotations actually scale as well.

I can pull in real life webpages. I can pull in videos as well. And what I actually have here. Is a video of the SMART solution being used in an aged care facility. And I wanted to bring this up specifically to highlight to you the application of SMART solution in healthcare spaces. So, it’s actually in this particular instance, it’s Ozcare facilities and they’re using the SMART board for patients with dementia and it’s about mental stimulus, social engagement, providing that edutainment value of actually getting the patients out of their seats and actually interacting with the content.

Traditionally the most stimulation that these patients got throughout the course of the day is actually being read to book. So now they’re able to get up and work with the content and directivity, not only that, what we can do virtual field trips and you use Google earth and take them to different parts of the world, really stimulating the mind and the brain.

We can also facilitate. Skype sessions and have them, uh, speaking. And I’m working with their loved ones who may be located on the other side of the world, extremely valuable. And I know the aged care use case is really not something it’s not the focus of our meeting here today, but I’d love the opportunity to dig deeper.

If anyone has any questions about the application of the SMART solution in aged care facilities, how the SMART board in conjunction with the SMART learning suite and our game-based learning is applied. We would love to speak with you about that. I can pause this. I can actually pick up my pan and make annotations here, highlight the board and send that back.

And again, those annotations are going to scale as well. Now you may have noticed up here that I actually have my PowerPoint presentation here. That I’ve been working on all along. So, I’m just going to double click here, pull up that PowerPoint presentation and walk you through another partnership that we have with Crestron that actually enhances the training experience as well.

So, we really quickly to review, we’re holding a training session. We have audio, we have video as a facilitator. I’m actually able to pull in multiple different pieces of content that’s relevant to our session. To make that experience a really valuable one. We also have a partnership with crush Tron, and what that partnership actually enables us to do is via their D 80, which is a decoder we’re actually able to take a video signal.

Think about from maybe the theatre where they’re actually live streaming. A surgery or able to take that video feed streaming directly back to a classroom and have that instructor actually interacted with or interact with that content and weep away. Smart in conjunction with crushed on are the only providers that enable these capabilities.

And it’s really, valuable just for again, bringing interactivity into a traditional big passive experience.

Okay, let’s talk really quickly before I wrap up here about the SMART solution applications for the administrative and operations of the hospital. So really the way in which we’ve designed our solution is to be a walk-up and use experience. So, I walk up to the board, I pick up my pen and I could start to write.

It’s designed to be really easy to use. It’s designed to be intuitive, and it’s designed to support all levels of worker from your least capable to your most capable. The solution itself is designed as an all-in-one product. So, what do I mean by that? We actually shipped with the IQ, Android embedded computing solution and what that gives us the ability to do is install any application on that board?

So, think about your traditional nursing stations. Think about your collaboration spaces or your huddle rooms, where traditionally there would just be a whiteboard or maybe a passive monitor. We actually now have the ability to install applications like Epic on the board itself to walk up and pick up a pen, brainstorm some things on the whiteboard, all baked into that one solution.

We also have embedded wireless screen-sharing that means is we’re actually able to take images that may have been taken by a doctor wirelessly, cast them up to the board and actually make annotations onto those images as well. The SMART board itself is designed to be an all-in-one solution that replaces a lot of your traditional analogue use cases by digitising them.

We also shift with what we call the SMART ink. As I mentioned earlier, that enables you to pull up any application that might be relevant to your business use case, pick up a pen, start to write on it, pull up your web-based applications, annotate over that, capture it back locally. And again, this is all done very easily.

It’s intuitive and it’s easy to use it’s designed so that there’s relatively low barriers to adoption. So, what about if you want to know more and if you want to take this to the next level? Well, we are available. The SMART team is available. https://visionext.com.au/contact-us/

We are here to support you and your demonstration needs.

We have demo facilities all over the world that are designed to support a high-quality audio, video, and content experience. We’ll sit with you individually, work through your means, work through your requirements. Talk about whether it needs to be a patient, a remote clinical healthcare application, whether it’s about training and professional development, or if it’s just your general administration, but not administrative and operational efficiencies.

We’re happy to sit and talk with you about that. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. We look forward to seeing you next time.

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