Background

Videoconferencing is used in many contexts e.g. in meetings between colleagues from different hospital units, in video remote interpreting, distance learning, medical conferences concerning coordination of patient pathways between several hospitals, and discharge planning conferences between hospitals and municipalities. By using videoconferencing employees within the region save both resources and travel time costs, and achieve efficient meetings with colleagues across the region. Viewed from a broader perspective, the use of videoconferencing is, therefore, in many ways instrumental in ensuring shorter patient pathways.

A project under the Patient@home umbrella seeks to spread the use of videoconferencing in the Region of Southern Denmark even more and to give clinicians new advanced possibilities for using videoconferencing together with data sharing when coordinating and planning patient treatments, such as operations across hospital units. In practical terms, members of the project team will take care of the ordering and installation of the video equipment to be used, teach employees, and provide ongoing support.

Purpose

The aim of the project is to make employees able to share photos and diagrams concerning patients of mutual concern on selected screens and to watch the other conference participants on another screen. This saves both time and travel costs as meetings can be attended from one's own choice of place without lowering the clinical quality, since the same clinical information is available to all attendants as if they were physically at the same place.

This is of special interest to Odense University Hospital (OUH), since it is the Region's specialised hospital and thus receives a large number of patients for surgery from other hospitals of the Region and from the Island of Zealand.

Expected results

After installation and training in the use of advanced 4-screen solutions that integrate videoconferencing and data sharing at the OUH departments of Cardiology and Gynaecology and Obstetrics, the surgeons and other staff members involved in preparing surgeries will save a great deal of the time that was previously used to drive to other hospital units where the surgery patients were - and prepare for the surgery and obtain all relevant information about the patient from colleagues.