We had an interesting client conversation today about video in healthcare and what the emerging use cases are. Telemedicine is an ever-emerging video application in healthcare with many vendors publishing specific case studies involving organizations around the world. We discussed with the client vendors such as Polycom, Cisco and Avaya that have great telemedicine case studies that highlight its tremendous value to both patients and healthcare organizations.
As we were discussing video with the client, it became apparent that we haven’t even identified all the use cases. There is an unlimited amount of ways video can be used in a healthcare setting. The caveat though, is that new use cases may bring with them legal and regulatory compliance concerns that must be dealt with.
Video – Telemedicine for Immediate Care
A valuable application for video is the ability for medical experts to perform remote care in areas where local expertise does not exist. For example, saving patients in rural areas time and money from traveling to urban health centers to see medical experts can be life saving in many ways. Immediate care via video can provide initial diagnosis that can potentially save lives.
Video – Training/Learning/Quality Improvement
Recording surgical procedures and making it available for replay can be useful for training other physicians on specific procedures. It can have other benefits such as improvement in quality as peers can review the video content. Also, surgeons knowing they will be recorded, may serve as an incentive for increased quality performance. The caveat here is that the video content now becomes discoverable if there is any legal action resulting from a surgical procedure.
Video can also be useful as a way to document treatment of patients that can then be archived and retrieved to show context of patient history for future treatments. Whatever procedures were performed on a patient gets recorded so future physicians get the full context of what has and hasn’t worked in different scenarios. However, here again we do have the issue of the content being discoverable once it has been captured.
Final Thoughts
Healthcare organizations have to weigh the pros and cons of using video, whether it be in real-time or as recorded content. A strategy must be put in place for consistency in capture and storage of video content. This calls for a complete video content management strategy that will surely include the legal team’s involvement. This becomes even more crucial as new use cases are discovered.
If you know of or hear any interesting use cases for video in healthcare, please do let us know. We are always interested in new and innovative ways of using video.