Transforming Public Safety, Healthcare and Education

Alcatel-Lucent

Conferencing and Collaboration Solutions: Making a Difference in Our Communities by Transforming Public Safety, Healthcare and Education

Today’s conferencing and collaboration technologies help organizations improve their bottom line through both hard return on investment (ROI) goals and soft dollar productivity benefits. Technology vendors with a vested interest in selling these solutions tout the business benefits of their specific applications – full feature sets, standards-based, vendor-neutral technology, low total cost of ownership with simple installation, hard ROI, ease of use etc. Certainly all of these are important considerations when organizations evaluate vendor solutions for their environments.

However, for industries like education, government, and healthcare, the bottom line is much more than just a number. Here the core goal is to provide safer communities and better access to quality education, services and care. Each organization needs to achieve these gains by doing more with fewer resources – whether it’s people, assets or dollars.

Some industry leaders have risen to this challenge and proven that conferencing and collaboration tools, when carefully planned and strategically deployed, can be used for much more than administrative and back office functions. Emergency first responders, care givers and educators can leverage collaborative communications to perform their duties more effectively and meet their community-focused mission.

Conferencing and Collaboration for Teaching Homebound Students

For K-12 educators, communications must extend outside the school into the home and community. The larger the district and the community it serves, the greater the challenge. Such is the situation with Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS), located 30 miles northeast of Atlanta and the largest district in Georgia with more than 157,000 students attending 114 schools.

Gwinnett County citizens value the important role education plays in building a thriving, diverse community and strongly support the school system’s pursuit of excellence. Technology adoption and innovation are critical in becoming a top performing school district. Gwinnett is ahead of the technology curve, with a sophisticated data network in place, migration to voice over IP (VoIP), and laptops and PCs deployed for nearly all teachers. GCPS also offers remote access via a secure portal for staff, students and parents to monitor school e-mail, test results and homework.

Gwinnett’s next challenge was developing a solution for educating homebound students, mostly in middle and high school, who miss classes because of short-term illnesses or longer-term injury or disability. Initially, special teaching staff would travel to each student’s home to provide a few hours of daily instruction, which was time consuming, and limited to one-on-one contact. The next step was providing access to an audio bridge for group lessons but with no graphics or visual aids, these voice-only lessons were boring and one-dimensional for today’s students accustomed to a multimedia experience.

Rick Overton, Gwinnett’s director of telecommunications and network services, and his team sought a better solution that would leverage their voice and data network. Conferencing and collaboration technology seemed a natural fit to motivate and instruct homebound students. The team selected a tool with access to feature-rich audio, web and video conferencing capabilities to support a wide range of Internet-based multimedia allowing teachers to use any desktop application or Web site to reinforce lesson information. For example, a science teacher walking students through an experiment can use an online video to illustrate the process while explaining each step. Teachers can also link real-time to slide shows, interactive graphing and whiteboard applications or packaged programs available with self-paced study notes and demonstrations. All of this can be accessed at anytime by homebound students.

Since transitioning to the conferencing and collaboration solution, GCPS has seen a remarkable difference in the quality of homebound education. “This high level of interactivity is very effective in keeping pace with the technology culture students are accustomed to outside school,” says Overton. “The ability to quickly switch from one visual component to another all within the same lesson keeps students interested and attentive, thereby facilitating greater retention.”

The GCPS initiative led by Overton is a prime example of taking conferencing and collaboration technology beyond the practical business case to transform the learning experience and make a real difference in student achievement.

Conferencing and Collaboration for Regional Public Safety and First Response

The Hampton Roads Planning District Commission (HRPDC), located in southeastern Virginia, builds partnerships that encourage regional cooperation and support for a proactive, integrated emergency management approach in the event of major emergencies or disasters.

HRPDC is comprised of ten cities, six counties and one town for an overall population of 1.6 million people. The Hampton Roads area includes one of the world’s largest harbors, more than 22 military installations and a nuclear power plant. Because of these strategic facilities, the region is at higher risk for terrorist attacks. Additionally, natural disasters like hurricanes and fierce wind and rain storms occasionally impact the region with severe flooding and widespread power outages.

In the face of these potential threats, the region requires secure, integrated emergency communications systems to help manage first responders in a crisis because disasters do not stop at the city or county lines. As part of this effort, HRPDC implemented a conferencing and collaboration solution at Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs) across 16 jurisdictions to improve emergency operations and preparedness and protect the safety and well being of its citizens.

Doug Onhaizer, communications technology administrator for Virginia Beach, has been instrumental in the project planning and deployment. The HRPDC collaborative vision started with a cross-EOC communications system via secure VoIP phone lines that also included a U.S. Coast Guard base and public broadcast TV station. In addition to voice conferencing, the solution provides data collaboration and video conferencing capabilities.

A key challenge for Onhaizer and his colleagues was connecting field-based land mobile radio (LMR) units into the EOCs’ communications systems. Emergency personnel and other authorities rely on radios to connect with central dispatch and headquarters. Without the integration of LMRs into the conferencing system and with other wireless devices, a significant emergency response blind spot remained. To address this issue, HRPDC chose a conferencing solution capable of supporting LMR devices with the addition of a SIP-to-radio gateway. Today, everyone can bridge into a teleconference for real-time voice interaction regardless of their device. This capability coupled with data and video conferencing features results in full collaboration between EOCs and remote users.

“With this solution, we can now hold more effective, timely briefings and quickly request the appropriate assistance from our various agencies,” Onhaizer said.

Onhaizer and the IT planning group were also careful to choose a voice-independent solution to work with their own legacy equipment and that could in the future potentially communicate with the diverse devices and networks – LMR, mobile, IP or PSTN phones – of other area state and federal agencies.

Aside from emergency events, the system remains in continual use for ongoing scenario planning and training. HRPDC will also make use of the application for disaster recovery measures to avoid confusion like what occurred after Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast. Intra-agency information sharing is imperative in recovery situations and for analyzing critical data. For HRPDC, the conferencing and collaboration technology is much more than just an emergency response solution. It is a strategic part of ongoing preparedness activities across the region.

The Hospice “Human Being” Care Model

Health care professionals are looking at new ways of using collaborative technologies to transform the care giving process not only to improve patient care and be more efficient, but also to provide a better overall experience for both the patient and their loved ones.

Trailblazers like Gay Madden, vice president of management information systems at The Hospice for the Florida Suncoast, realize just how important timely collaboration is in today’s health care environment.

“For us, real-time communication is very important. Our staff members see patients all over the place – in nursing homes, in apartment buildings, in hospitals. If we don’t have real-time communication, then the burden of coordinating care falls to the patient,” explains Madden, who views building a technology environment that focuses on patient care and the patient experience as her primary IT leadership role.

Under Madden’s leadership, The Hospice for the Florida Suncoast is making significant strides in this area. The organization started in 1977 as a small, all-volunteer staff dedicated to providing the Hospice mission in their region. Today, the Hospice for the Florida Suncoast is the nation's largest not-for-profit, community-based provider of hospice and palliative care with 17 care teams and several inpatient units serving tens of thousands of people annually.

“ Our goal”, says Madden, “is to help each person in our community find quality of life and live each day with meaning and purpose. Toward that goal, we are constantly adding new programs and services to meet the changing needs of our community.”

Madden and her team outlined specific field scenarios for their conferencing and collaboration deployments that strive to put the patient and family needs first. They identified two key areas to focus their efforts – last touch patient visits so dispersed families can connect with their loved ones and virtual patient visits with coordinated clinical support.

The Hospice care model is distributed amongst teams. The care team leadership manages the Hospice services overall within their regions; field members conduct patient visits; and support centers provide such services as durable medical equipment (DME), pharmacy and bereavement needs for the patients and families across care teams. This model requires interdisciplinary collaboration with frequent communication between teams.

Patient and family communications are at the heart of Hospice care because for patients at the end of life, every communication is critical. As a result, The Hospice for the Florida Suncoast provides audio conferencing services to every family so they can speak with both the patient and other remote family members as needed. For critically ill patients, the field care nurse can assist with these last touch visits from the patient bedside, using a laptop and any telephony device to reach family members when the patient is feeling up to a call or during the last moments of life. Because calls are routed through the Hospice PBX displaying the Hospice caller ID, family members know this is an important call. These last touch visits may be audio-only sessions or, with the assistance of the field nurse, a video conference for a more intimate and lasting experience. Recording these last moments can also offer much needed support and comfort to family members.

Field care teams may also contact other team members, such as a chaplain or the pharmacy, if a patient has spiritual needs or pain management concerns. For each care team member, the collaboration solution displays their availability by phone, IM, or video conference. For example, if a patient experiences increased pain the field nurse can initiate a virtual patient visit with an available physician using the presence information and ad hoc communication features of the solution. This keeps the patient from waiting in discomfort while the doctor is in transit, as well as reduces transportation costs and delays in care. Using a laptop and video client, the nurse can also share images of a patient’s wounds or DME with the senior staff nurse, physician or DME representative whenever necessary. In some cases, a simple ad hoc audio conference is sufficient to review vital signs and order additional treatment if needed. Recording these virtual visits also helps with patient records, quality control, and for sharing treatment updates with family members.

All of these real-life examples demonstrate how collaborative tools make a difference in helping institutional organizations address the needs of the communities they serve. By remaining focused on their overall mission and not just the financial bottom line, these IT leaders have developed and executed use cases that extend the features and benefits of conferencing and collaboration solutions to include their front line staff – emergency first responders, care givers, and educators. In this capacity, these solutions are bringing people together across roles and functions to break down the communication silos that hamper an organizations ability to provide coordinated and effective programs. The results are well adopted, successful deployments that transform not only how the services are delivered but the results for students, citizens and patients.