Vidyo lands huge deal in Canada with Ontario Telemedicine Network

Video conferencing specialist Vidyo announced a major win today, landing Ontario Telemedicine Network, one of the world's largest telemedicine players. It's a feather in the cap of the New Jersey-based personal telepresence company that has been nipping at the heels of the big boys, Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO) and Polycom (Nasdaq:PLCM), and leading a pack of hungry wannabes.

The deal will allow OTN to expand its existing telehealth network into patients' homes using the Vidyo platform and interoperate with OTN's existing telemedicine system.

All of Ontario's hospitals, as well as a large number of other health care locations in the Canadian province, already are equipped with telehealth centers, and helped conduct 134,000 consultations last year. The system includes 1,175 sites and more than 3,000 health professionals as users. The system has Cisco and Polycom devices as its backbone and runs on a private network.

OTN plans to place the Vidyo network in thousands of additional locations, from offices to homes, over the next three years.

"The hardware based systems work fantastically well, but the major challenge is they cost anywhere from $5,000 up to $25,000 to deploy a unit," Dr. Ed Brown, CEO of OTN told InformationWeek Healthcare. "What we are now seeing is a groundswell of new mobile devices. Everyone's got an iPad, a laptop and a smartphone and the Internet has improved in quality so we just have a great opportunity to disrupt the more expensive model and implement the more cost efficient and ubiquitous model."

Vidyo's rich APIs allowed an easy integration with OTN's existing scheduling and telemedicine workflow software. Vidyo was also able to provide seamless operation on both OTN's private and public networks, as well as firewall traversal capabilities, which made Vidyo "service provider ready," secure, scalable, and simple to manage and deploy.

Canada is a leader in the telehealth push, counting more than 5,700 telehealth endpoints in 1,175 communities. A recent study said that healthcare providers conducted more than 250,000 consultations in Canada.

"Across the country, use of telehealth is growing rapidly, bridging the distance between patients and their care providers," said Dr. Jennifer Zelmer, SVP of Clinical Adoption and Innovation at Canada Health Infoway. "Canadians do not have to travel as often to receive care, and the study reports improvements in access to care, quality and productivity valued at millions of dollars last year."

For more:
- see this release
- see this Technology News & Gossip post

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