Through this network, telemedicine services are provided in 60 subspecialties, including internal medicine, surgery, psychiatry, radiology and pathology, by dozens of service providers. More than 600,000 patients have received services over the network.
Meanwhile, in 2004, as the IOM was pointing to communication gaps among health care professionals as a cause of significant problems, Arizona officials decided to create a new Phoenix branch for the state's medical school, the University of Arizona College of Medicine, in partnership with Arizona State University.
As part of that project, state leaders decided to build on the ATP's successes, and they identified the telemedicine program as an enabling technology for the educational program.
"We were selected by top leadership to think about how technology could make a difference," Weinstein says.
ATP leaders saw videoconferencing as a way to draw together students and professionals from the different health care disciplines in new ways.
"It's literally a new method of teaching medical students. It's a novel approach," says Jim Mauger, director of engineering at Audio Video Resources, a company hired to design and install the videoconferencing equipment for the T-Health Institute.
The T-Health Institute is on the campus of Arizona's new medical school in Phoenix. When it opened in 2006, every classroom on the campus was equipped with videoconferencing capabilities that tied back into a central control room, Mauger says. At that time, the T-Health amphitheater contained a standard teleconferencing setup, he explains.
From that base, Mauger says project leaders immediately started implementing the sophisticated technologies that are present today.
Because the ATP already had a statewide broadband health care telecommunications network in place, those implementing the infrastructure for the T-Health Institute could focus on getting the audio and video equipment needed for the job, says Michael Holcomb, the ATP's associate director for network architecture.
Broadcast Booth
The T-Health Institute uses a Tandberg 1500 videoconferencing system, and its video wall has 12 50-in. Toshiba P503DL DLP Datawall RPU Video Cubes. The video wall itself is controlled by a Jupiter Fusion 960 Display Wall Processor utilizing dual Intel Xeon processors. The Fusion 960 allows the wall to display fully movable and scalable images from multiple PC, video and network sources.