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Looking to apply its products more specifically to vertical markets, the fast-growing personal telepresence upstart Vidyo on Wednesday launched VidyoHealth, a version of its videoconferencing suite intended for the rapidly expanding health care and telemedicine space.
The rise of Vidyo in the channel has been significant since the startup company emerged from stealth mode in 2007. Vidyo's Web-based videoconferencing suite is IP-based and aims to provide low-latency, HD-quality video conferencing and presence that doesn't have the wallet-busting price tag of competitive video conferencing systems.
"A Polycom or a Tandberg would have been the solution of choice up until now," said Marty Hollander, senior vice president of marketing at Vidyo. "The promise for the value of telemedicine is that you can leave the restricted network and go out onto the Internet to do what you need to do. We can provide that."
VidyoHealth, Hollander argued, eliminates the need for dedicated telemedicine infrastructure for health care providers -- crucial, he explained, for physicians and other caregivers that want to integrate video conferencing into their daily workflows as conveniently as possible.
"Say you have a practitioner based in a rural area five hours from the nearest medical center," he said. "They'd like to have a consult from a specialist, and to send that person to the center would be a day trip. Maybe it's just something on the skin that they'd like to examine. Well, if the physician has a camera, they can all take care of that issue within minutes as opposed to having to arrange for travel and all of that."
The design of VidyoHealth is based in convenience, ease-of-use -- it has optional one-touch activation for home-based patients, for example, that don't have much computer experience -- and security.
The VidyoHealth suite includes AES-128 Media Encryption and HTTPS Signaling Encryption, as well as embedded auto firewall detection and traversal software. It also has restricted access features to maintain privacy between the doctors' office and, for example, patients who arrive early on the video stream for appointments -- a "knock on the door" safeguard, Hollander explained.
"HIPAA compliance requires the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship," Hollander said. "Which isn't to say the doctor doesn't use the phone, but for video conferencing, we wanted to ensure they had really high quality encryption on the media."
