Cisco's New Extended Care Solution to Enable Patient Engagement and Care Team Collaboration at Any Time and From Anywhere

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Dec 5, 2013) - Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced the global availability of Cisco® Extended Care, a new browser-based health and wellness collaboration solution that allows patients to easily interact with their care teams from the home, the office or other remote locations. Understanding the increased role that patients want to play in their overall health-care experience, Cisco Extended Care can enable patient engagement while improving the patient experience and access to care. Through new capabilities, such as ad hoc and scheduled video consults, and highly secure messaging and consultation questionnaires, patients are now able to conveniently communicate with their physicians. Unlike competitors in the space, this new solution can also provide open application programming interfaces (APIs) allowing customers to enable third-party applications and environments, such as video workflow, into their existing patient portal solution, thus protecting existing investments.

"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," said David Plummer, general manager, Cisco's Care-at-a-Distance Solutions. "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." 

A recent Cisco survey showed that nearly 74% 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. This shift in consumer attitude opens up new opportunities for hospitals and clinics to increase efficiency, while at the same time providing greater continuity of care, driving wellness education and potentially lowering the cost of care delivery. With new lines of communication and an increased dialogue between patients and doctors, hospitals can hope to see lower rates of readmittance.

Cisco Extended Care provides several new capabilities aimed at streamlining and improving patient care, including:

• Ad hoc video consults: Patients are provided with highly secure access to their care team, potentially reducing unnecessary trips to urgent care or emergency facilities.
• Highly secure messaging: This capability improves care coordination by enabling highly secure communications from care teams to their patients. It 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.
• Scheduled video consults: Allowing for enhanced follow-up care, patients are able to connect with their care team without having to physically visit a hospital or clinic. Patients have anytime access to appointment information through a user-friendly interface. 
• Online preappointment questionnaires: Saving total clinical time required for video consultations, Cisco Extended Care provides the ability to provide customizable preappointment questionnaires based on patient type.
• Video library platform: Hospitals and clinics can use Cisco Extended Care to offer health and wellness education to their patients through an integrated video platform. Patients can receive personalized educational content from their care teams via the solution.
• Wellness device readings: 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. Through this capability, patients can take greater responsibility for managing their overall health and wellness.

Cisco Extended Care supports numerous video options, including Cisco Jabber®, to provide a seamless, highly secure and mobile experience for patients and care teams while providing a high-quality consultative experience at a distance. The browser-based solution also provides a streamlined and user-friendly workflow, including "one-click" video connections. 

"The largest challenge facing our health care system clients today is providing accessible, cost-effective and high-quality care," said Ted Baker, vice president, Healthcare Solutions at Presidio. "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. 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. Extended Care, as an easy to adopt solution that mutually benefits both patients and care-givers, is exactly what our clients are looking for."

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Tags / Keywords:
Cisco, Extended Care, health care, Jabber

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