Cisco has introduced a browser-based health and wellness collaboration solution, Cisco Extended Care. Patients will now be able to interact with their care giver teams from any remote location such as the office or home.
David Plummer, general manager, Cisco’s Care-at-a-Distance Solutions said, “Cisco’s extended care solution offers our customers a new way to cater to patient wants and needs, ultimately providing patients with a better experience and increasing their engagement and involvement with their own care.”
“By allowing patients and their care teams the opportunity to connect for both ad hoc and prescheduled video consults, and by providing secure messaging capabilities and online questionnaires, our hospital and clinic customers will be able to operate in a more efficient manner,” Plummer added.
This solution will serve the needs of patients who are desirous to have greater control of their personal health factors. Cisco Extended Care will not only enhance patient engagement it will give easier access to medical care and improve patient experience, said officials.
Ad hoc and scheduled video consults, secure messaging and consultation questionnaires are the new capabilities available in Cisco Extended Care in addition to better communication between patient and physician.
The solution also features open application programming interfaces (APIs) so that customers can benefit from third-party applications and environments like including video workflow into their existing patient portal solution.
The secure messaging capability allows greater care coordination between care teams and patients. Appointment reminders and sharing of clinical information with patients is also possible. Cisco Extended Care offers a customizable pre-appointment questionnaire based on patient type while the video library platform delivers health and wellness education to patients.
Also the wellness device readings allow patients to manually input information from their devices at home. This information can be tracked and visually displayed and is expected to encourage patients to be more responsible towards their health and wellness.
In related news Hospital Galenia, a tertiary care hospital, has incorporated Cisco medical-grade network, or MGN, in its infrastructure in order to offer medical care to its patients through the integration and interoperability of each functional area, optimizing interactions among healthcare participants, medical applications and hardware components. The MGN can provide seamless and highly secure health data exchange and communications for the healthcare community.