Networking giant Cisco announced the launch of Extended Care, a browser-based health and wellness collaboration platform that allows patients to interact with their care teams from the home, the office or other remote locations.
One of the platform’s main features is secure messaging, which can improve care coordination by enabling highly secure communications from care teams to their patients.
It also provides hospitals and clinics with the ability to send appointment reminders and share relevant clinical information directly with patients, such as new health education videos.
“The largest challenge facing our health care system clients today is providing accessible, cost-effective and high-quality care,” Ted Baker, vice president of health care solutions at Presidio, said in a statement. “As a provider of intelligent IT solutions for hospitals and clinics across the United States, we are constantly looking for new ways to address the issues facing today’s care facilities and their patients.”
Other features include the capability to put patients in touch with their care team through ad hoc or scheduled video consultations, where patients have anytime-access to appointment information through a user-friendly interface.
“With the rise in states approving insurance reimbursement for remote services, care-at-a-distance and collaboration technologies like Extended Care can take on today’s challenges by maximizing a care facility’s time and money without sacrificing the patient experience,” Baker continued. “Extended Care, as an easy-to-adopt solution that mutually benefits both patients and caregivers, is exactly what our clients are looking for.”
Extended Care provides the ability to provide customizable online preappointment questionnaires based on patient type and offers an integrated video platform where patients can receive personalized educational content from their care teams through the solution.
Rounding out the package are wellness device readings, where a patient can manually input information from their devices at home, which then may be tracked and visually displayed for both the patient and their care team.
A recent Cisco survey showed that nearly 80 percent of the 1,547 respondents were open to sharing medical information online, and the majority of those patients were comfortable with the idea of communicating with doctors using technology instead of seeing them in person.
“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,” David Plummer, general manager, Cisco’s Care-at-a-Distance Solutions, said in a statement. “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.”
Extended Care also supports numerous video options, including Cisco Jabber, to provide a mobile experience for patients and care teams while providing a consultative experience at a distance. The browser-based solution also provides a streamlined and user-friendly workflow, including one-click video connections.