To anyone who has not been paying attention, there is a global shortage of healthcare professionals. This can be attributed to a number of causes, including a growing number of chronic conditions in a multitude of healthcare sectors. Most notably of late is the global pandemic, which has created a flood of people seeking medical assistance. Despite health and wellness is a global issue, laws, policies, and institutional support for programs to address health and wellness concerns differ from country to country. In addition to regulatory impacts on health-related services, a host of cultural variances are also at play that must be considered. IDSolutions has devoted years to building a video solution that balances cost, culture, and accessibility, while ensuring the easy and effective delivery of communication technology for patients and physicians. IDSolutions empowers healthcare professionals to do more with less with Video Visitation.
Video Visitation extends the reach of healthcare workers into rural and remote areas. The solution removes the barriers for patients to receive care from general practitioners and also supports communication with third party specialists if desired. “We aim to enhance the efficiency and scalability of Telehealth capabilities, enabling them to be done anywhere anytime in a diverse and disparate environment,” says Tracy Mills, the Founder, and CEO of IDSolutions.
Strategic Visionary of IDSolutions
Tracy is an industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience in communication solutions across many vertical markets. Before founding IDSolutions, he spent a decade at AT&T leading communications software and eventually as the Director of Video Conferencing. Apart from being an entrepreneur, he is active in supporting and growing lives through his other endeavor as the Director of the Western Golf Association. Tracy also coaches various youth sports teams and serves as a volunteer board member for Forum Credit Union in supporting people to achieve their financial dreams.
At IDSolutions, Tracy is responsible for business planning and strategic vision as well as management of its day to day business. He leads the company with the philosophy that company culture is just as important as a business strategy. The great integrity, ethics, and the highest standards combined with Tracy’s dedication to customer satisfaction have been the key to IDSolutions’ profitability and productive team environment. Tracy has been committed to delivering innovative technology solutions to IDSolutions customers. He shares and embodies IDSolutions aspiration of turning “Technology into a Solution” which enables and enhances healthcare, education, and enterprise communications.
Enhancing Healthcare Through Technology
Implementing telehealth is challenging because the requirements of any program and its users are infinitely diverse and disparate. To cater to these requirements, IDSolutions provide two main offerings within the healthcare market—Continuity & MedSitter. Continuity is securely connecting, integrating, and supporting organizations’ diverse and disparate clinical data, people, workflows, and systems. It enables the change for organizations while giving great consideration to the existing workflows and processes. Most importantly Continuity does this with end to end 24×7 support.
Besides this, MedSitter is the flagship product of IDSolutions, which provides a cloud-based platform for patient observation. It is a SaaS program that blends software and hardware, enabling remote observation and communication with patients. The product is primarily used by the hospitals and health providers to record the fall risk patients. Recently, MedSitter has been pivoted to observe positive or presumptive positive COVID-19 patients. Tracy explained further, “Typically a mobile cart with cameras, speakers, and monitors are placed with the patient and a remote observer can communicate with the patient with bi-directional video and audio. In the context of COVID, this can provide protective social distancing from patients and preserve valuable PPE.”
In addition to MedSitter, IDSolutions have a range of telehealth configurations and tools that enable remote communication with physicians, nurses, and care providers.
Blend of Technology and Innovation
IDSolutions has technology and innovation at its core, which is evident in every solution the company has brought to the market. Most recently this has included integrated AI, like machine learning to power the vision intelligence layer. “In our vision intelligence layer we have real-time motion detection, people and object detection for in-room context, camera auto-tracking, ambient light measurement, and more,” Tracy explained. He continued, “technology and innovation are great equalizers in ensuring global access to care.”
As the healthcare industry struggled to find its feet amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, other common challenges went unmet, and oftentimes were exacerbated. Specifically how to communicate across language barriers. MedSitter was fortuitously positioned to address this issue, even before the pandemic, and currently on track to support more than 60 languages, in which an observer can present pre-recorded native speaker audio to a patient, by the end of the year. What’s more, many of those languages are available for cross-language text-to-speech. MedSitter plans to expand the language library to include American Sign Language, as well as other manual languages in the future.
In an effort to improve usability and ease the adoption of its technology, MedSitter has worked to ensure that the hardware offered can be used in a dual-purpose configuration. Specifically, the medical carts can be used for remote patient observation, but also for telehealth virtual visitation, and soon, video remote interpreting. The innovative solutions are the result of maintaining close ties with its customers and partners. “We work with hundreds of hospital organizations supporting their digital telehealth and sitting needs, through these relationships we have deep insights into the needs and challenges of healthcare as the industry rapidly evolves,” concluded Tracy.
A commonality in our Humanity
The pandemic has shown the global community that people have more in common than not. Tracy is humbled to see that the world has managed to find a common ground by looking into the face of fragility and ultimately finding strength. He adds, “We are determined to use every ounce of our talent, resources, and partner relationships to help win the fight against COVID-19.”
The pandemic has affected the healthcare industry and altered the norms; priorities have changed as have how hospitals are investing in their futures. Tracy is optimistic that even though the crisis has made clear the vulnerabilities in the healthcare space, it has also opened the door for a new generation of technology-based healthcare services. Healthcare providers have had to rapidly pivot to ensure they are able to provide care while adopting new workflows, technologies, and methodologies. Many challenges, like shortages of PPE kits, might be temporary, the paradigm shift related to technology is here to stay.
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