OTN
![]() | If you see a guy holding a white hockey puck to his forehead, that’ll be Jesse Hirsh. If you see a guy checking his heart rate on his watch, that’ll be Ed Brown.
At OTN’s fabulously successful March 30 Hackathon, Jesse interviewed Ed about the future of connected, virtual health care. The first topic on the agenda was the engaged patient. That segued rather quickly to comparisons of personal health monitoring devices. Jesse showed the audience his Scanadu Scout. It looks like a hockey puck and measures blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and blood oxygen levels, sending the data to your iPhone. Ed, who has a Peak Basis watch that monitors heart rate, among other things, pulled out his smart phone, calling it the... |
Health & Wellness App: Screenshot from <30 Days iPhone app by Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada
Apps have grown in popularity over the last few years; in fact, Apple’s App Store has over a million apps with many focusing on healthcare. Suffice to say, apps are becoming very important to consumers in North America. I see apps as being in two categories: the first category is wellness, for example apps that deal with smoking cessation, weight loss, healthy eating choices, lifestyle issues for hypertension, etc. These apps can be useful as coaching aids for people to self-manage. The second category is apps that assist... | |
The future of virtual care is mHealth – incorporating mobile devices into the delivery of virtual services. Recently, I wrote about how OTN is offering Personal Videoconferencing on a personal computer, so you don’t need to go to a room-based studio with a codec and a camera. Instead, you can download software onto a personal computer, and conduct the consultation over that device via the internet with other endpoints, whether it’s a Personal Videoconferencing device or a room-based studio. Eventually this functionality will be extended to any mobile device – tablet or... | |
OTN was established in 1997 with the vision that telemedicine will be a mainstream channel for healthcare delivery and education. There were several barriers initially including startup costs, a compelling business case, a process for scheduling events, paying doctors, and overcoming health care professionals’ (HCP) resistance to using the technologies. A business and operational strategy was developed, always keeping in mind the need to be as easy and convenient to use as face-to-face encounters.
OTN currently has four channels of virtual care:
Elective Virtual Ambulatory Care: Last year OTN supported over 300,000 provider/patient real-time video consultations in over 40 specialty services. The top 5 therapeutic... | |
OTN est un organisme indépendant à but
non lucratif, qui est financé par
le Gouvernement de l’Ontario.