LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwire - April 29, 2008) - Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) spotlighted Adena Health
System's innovative use of telemedicine video conferencing to deliver
expert neonatal care in a media roundtable with Jayshree Ullal, Cisco
senior vice president of data center, switching and services, at the
Interop 2008 Conference today. Adena Health System, a leading healthcare
organization that serves the residents of a 10-county region in southern
Ohio, deployed a video conferencing system based on a Cisco® Campus
Communications Fabric framework. With this solution, Adena Health System
can now link its main facility, Adena Regional Medical Center, to
Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, as part of an ongoing
initiative to provide a higher level of care for patients.
Adena Health System's innovative telemedicine initiative began in 2006 when
it connected its neonatal department with Nationwide Children's Hospital's
neonatal intensive care unit via a video conferencing system. While Adena
Regional Medical Center provides outstanding care for mothers and newborns,
it has limited access to physicians specializing in neonatal critical care.
For that reason, Adena doctors typically had little choice but to transfer
any newborn that might need critical care to Nationwide Children's
Hospital, located 70 miles north in Columbus. In fact, Adena typically
transferred more newborns to Children's Hospital than any other provider
outside Columbus. These transfers could place significant strain on
families and newborn patients.
With the telemedicine video conferencing solution based on Cisco Catalyst
6500, 4500 and 3750 Series Switches, specialists at Nationwide Children's
Hospital have the opportunity to evaluate newborns with their own eyes and
make more accurate diagnoses, share test results and imaging films, and
fully participate in treatment by consulting with Adena doctors as if they
were standing in the same room. For Adena families, it means more advanced
care closer to home, no long commutes for visiting family and friends, and
fewer newborns that need to be transferred 70 miles away. In just its
first year of operation, the project helped cut the number of patients
transferred from Adena to Nationwide Children's Hospital by 50 percent,
from 70 to 35 newborns.
"There are many benefits and advantages the telemedicine initiative has
brought to Adena Health System, and the most important one is that we can
now provide a higher level of care for our patients who need help the
most," said Marcus Bost, chief information officer for Adena Health System.
"The Cisco integrated network provides a highly secure and high-performing
foundation that we are confident will support our high-definition video
conferencing system as well as our large clinical imaging files and other
business-critical medical applications. Furthermore, it simplified
operations and management when we standardized on Cisco Catalyst switches."
As the Adena Health System focuses on enhancing patient care, delivering
cost savings and increasing productivity, the company is exploring more
advanced uses of video. One area it is exploring is the inclusion of
virtual classrooms in the major education campus being constructed near the
medical center. The campus will comprise a four-year nursing school in
collaboration with Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, as well as all
other Adena educational partners, including Ohio University and Hocking
College. In these virtual classrooms, physicians from anywhere in the
world will use a telemedicine application and the Cisco integrated network
to teach remote students. The new facility will also support video
recording and broadcasting over the Cisco integrated network.
Transforming Business Communications and Collaboration: Cisco Video-Ready
Campus
Businesses are making video applications such as desktop video,
surveillance, telepresence and digital signage an integral part of
communications, collaboration and business processes. To help these
companies, Cisco is demonstrating how the Campus Communications Fabric
framework delivers the Video-Ready Campus for delivering a consistent,
high-quality user experience and simplified operations as video adoption
increases.
"Cisco has put great emphasis in enhancing our Catalyst Series Switches to
allow businesses of all sizes to deploy Video-Ready Campus networks," said
Marie Hattar, vice president of network systems and security for Cisco.
"We believe that video applications will drive business innovations and
will help customers such as Adena Health System build a communication and
collaboration platform with the capabilities to greatly enhance patient
care and customer service."
The Cisco Video-Ready Campus gives businesses and organizations a roadmap
for addressing three critical criteria that successful video deployments
require:
-- Optimization through intelligent services. Intelligent services are
implemented at every layer of the network to ensure high-quality user
experiences, visibility into video traffic, and the ability to control the
traffic.
-- Integrated security. Highly secure platforms and solutions provide
information confidentiality, admission control and threat defense.
-- Scale. Increasing loads on network bandwidth and services are
supported as users and requirements grow.
Cisco Catalyst Series Switches are at the center of the Campus
Communications Fabric's Video-Ready Campus, a solution that helps customers
optimize their video deployments throughout their organization. For more
information please visit www.cisco.com/go/ccf.
About Cisco Systems
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