Polycom and CyraCom Partner to Help Healthcare Providers Serve the Hearing Impaired

Polycom, a provider of telepresence, video and voice communication solutions and CyraCom, a language services provider for healthcare industry, have announced a joint offering for a new sign language interpretation service that will aid healthcare providers better serve the hearing impaired.

 

Leveraging Polycom (News - Alert) video solutions, CyraCom will help hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities to gain 24-hour remote access to nationally certified American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters who specialize in healthcare communication.

 

CyraCom has stated that their service is a cost effective way for hospitals to fulfill the American Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act requirements.

 

Recently logistical limitations due to budget cuts have been aggravated because of the weak economic climate and hospitals are finding it hard to keep interpreters employed for a full day. CyraCom claims that it solves these problems by offering healthcare providers just-in-time access to a pool of nationally certified ASL interpreters located throughout the United States.

 

The interpreters in order to offer quality analysis of their patients’ signs have to see them in good sight and sound and so providers must have access to solutions that dependably enable both. CyraCom after evaluating a lot of solutions chose to model its interpretation services based on standards-based Polycom systems which offered the reliability, quality of experience, and flexibility required for use in healthcare environments.

 

CyraCom facilitated clear communications between hearing impaired patients and ASL interpreters by deploying cart-based Polycom HDX 7000 series system with a flat-panel display and camera specifically designed to be used in healthcare facilities. The cart allows the flat screen to swivel and the camera to rotate to accommodate bedside ASL interpretation.

 

SueAnne McCreery, ASL coordinator at CyraCom, said that ASL interpretation can be required at any point in the healthcare process, from initial intake and triage to consultation with doctors and nurses. ASL is very complex in its formation and there is a lot of grammatical information on the face of the person signing. A slight nuance in facial expression might change the entire communication so the video quality has to be good enough to meet that demand.

 

Polycom said that its HDX series systems is well suited for transmission of sign language interpretations in high quality. Polycom’s Lost Packet Recovery (LPR) technology helps healthcare providers achieve a consistently high-quality video experience even over public broadband networks susceptible to packet loss and congestion.

 

Recently Polycom and Aruba drove VoIP over WLAN and Euphonix selected Polycom for HD voice phone system.