Polycom (News - Alert), Inc., a provider of standards-based unified communications (UC), today will demonstrate how its Polycom RealPresence video and voice collaboration solutions can help healthcare organizations improve the ways they learn, teach, and deliver care at annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference and exhibition, according to a company press release.

Polycom’s telemedicine solutions are helping healthcare organizations bring medical services to people who live in remote and rural areas and have much less access to medical care (according to the World Health Organization, as reported in the press release, 60 percent of the world's population live in rural areas,while 75 percent of consultants and medical professionals live in urban centers).

A recent conference held by the Federation of State Medical Boards found that the use of telemedicine will increase exponentially because of “a growing population, expected to reach more than 360 million by 2030, which will increase the demand for medical services; a projected physician shortage, which could reach 130,000 by the year 2025; a rapid increase of older Americans, coping with chronic diseases, many of whom are likely to be home-bound and physically challenged late in life, and a lack of access to medical services in many parts of the country”.

Distance doesn’t just hurt patients who can’t receive the care they need, it’s also a major cost for hospitals, due to costly transfers to medical centers for treatment, according to the press release – anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000 per trip for emergency transport via helicopter.

Polycom said in the press release that its Polycom RealPresence video is helping by “bringing healthcare providers and remote, home-care, and quarantined patients together face-to-face for consultation, evaluation, and monitoring.”

You may be hundreds of miles from a cardiologist but one can now conduct a remote consultation and prescribe treatment from a home office, or even from on the road, over video, according to the press release.

Polycom reports in the press release that a new business model, called a “hub-and-stroke business model,” has been created to facilitate healthcare for rural residents, “where a central facility is the hub and smaller facilities or individual specialists are the spokes, allowing healthcare providers to provide round-the-clock consultation and remote treatment of patients via high-definition, interactive video.”

“We're dealing with situations where minutes count and using video telemedicine is simply the best way to improve care delivery.” Brian Henry, Telemedicine Program Developer - Trauma Services, Dell (News - Alert) Children's Medical Center of Central Texas, said in the press release.

In the UK the National Health Service (NHS) has used video for its new telestroke services, saving millions of dollars in clinician travel and after-patient care by “bringing stroke specialists to the patient via video to enable timely life-saving diagnosis by the specialists”.

“For a really quite small financial outlay, we've got a 24-hour consultant-led service for stroke patients,” Dr. Mark O'Donnell, stroke consultant at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Clinical Lead for the CSNLC, said in the press release.

Polycom said that it also provides services for Medical Missions for Children (MMC), an organization dedicated to improving medical outcomes for critically-ill children in over 100 countries around the world, by “allowing volunteer physicians in the U.S. to consult with peer physicians, examine patients, and offer treatment plans to children using Polycom RealPresence solutions.”

Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM (News - Alert) in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.