Telemedicine solutions specialist Avizia announced the launch of its flagship telemedicine platform, Telehealth, which integrates carts, software and peripherals and is tied to providers’ electronic health records (EHRs) and backend systems.
The company offers pilot packages designed to address the most common modalities that health care providers are striving to address today, including telestroke, behavioral health, e-visits and urgent care.
“When we founded Avizia, we saw that most vendors in the space were simply throwing pieces over the fence and expecting the hospital IT departments to put it all together,” Mike Baird, CEO of Avizia, told eWEEK. “We felt like having a tightly integrated platform would be critical to the success of telemedicine and set out to build a telehealth platform. With Avizia, we have the hardware, software and professional services in a complete solution that make it easier to deploy, use and integrate with your existing systems.”
The company’s Telehealth equipment, including carts and peripherals, connects physicians and specialists with each other and their patients at the point of care, while customers can tailor a solution fit to their needs or choose from a series of pre-packaged modality solutions that require minimal training.
“When a patient is having a stroke, or needs critical care of any sort, the last thing you want someone to think about is how to use the device, the software, the scope, etc.—which makes ease of use absolutely critical,” Baird said. “We pride ourselves on building devices that are user-friendly—approachable and simple. Then you know a nurse or clinician is focused on the patient, without worrying if the device is ready to go or how to operate it.”
Avizia peripherals, such as the Horus scope or E-Scope capture point-of-care equivalent digital images, videos and sound recordings of the body, and all peripherals’ video images and audio integrate with Telehealth software and other patient data systems.
“Telemedicine adoption will continue to grow in all aspects of medicine. Today, it is used primarily for extending the reach of specialists in short supply like neurologists or psychiatrists, but in the future, we see it being completely interwoven with all aspects of health care,” Baird explained. “You should be able to do follow-ups with your surgeon, or call your primary care doc on demand from the device of your choice.”
Baird noted this means the road map has to extend to incorporating more devices for interaction, such as iPads and smartphones, and in making the software-as-a-service cloud more tightly integrate with backend systems like the EHR.
This way, the patient’s record can be leveraged by the entire care team so they can all benefit from the shared knowledge of the patient’s shared medical history.
“This is the future of medicine and is only possible by leveraging telemedicine in a big way,” he said.