Chris Herot

Chris Herot

CEO and Co-founder, SBR Health
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Improving the usability of televideo technologies

Studies have shown that successful use of videoconferencing and real-time communications can profoundly benefit patients and doctors alike. Health care outcomes improve when truly collaborative communication takes place among doctors, specialists. Until recently, the specialized equipment, complexity and expensive network infrastructure required by video, as well as poor Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement policies made it impractical to utilize televideo technologies for care delivery unless the patient was a great distance from the doctor. Now, changing reimbursement models and low-cost desktop PC-based televideo technologies are making it easy and cost effective to use televideo in a wider array of patient and inter-clinician interactions.

Today, low cost and ubiquitous technologies exist that can facilitate a world in which videoconferencing has a place on the desk of every doctor, nurse and clinician. However, what is needed at the clinician level are applications designed specifically for the health care industry with televideo as a communications modality. These need to be extremely simple, highly secure, low cost and fully customizable. With these types of applications, health care professionals would have simple efficient communications tools to increase access to specialists, raise the overall levels of patient care, and improve delivery of treatment.

After interacting with a variety of forward-thinking healthcare professionals, SBR Health has learned that simply reducing the cost and complexity of televideo technologies itself does not solve the larger problem of how to utilize new and existing televideo technologies seamlessly in existing IT and clinical processes. Despite decreasing equipment costs and low-cost ubiquitous PC-based televideo, it remains difficult to integrate videoconferencing into health care workflows. In effect, we discovered something that proved to be true throughout health care--the success of any technology depends only 10% on the technology and 90% on how that technology is integrated with the organization’s workflow and protocols. It isn’t that the healthcare community is crying out for more, cheaper technology, but that it needs solutions to facilitate the delivery of care in a more efficient and effective manner.

SBR Health will talk about the shortcomings of utilizing video as a means of communication in delivering care to patients at multiple places within the healthcare system, spanning from pre-encounter triages, to in-hospital settings to post-discharge locations such as rehab facilities, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, or even in their own homes. We will then address how applications and user interfaces can be developed tightly couple the use of televideo with existing clinical and IT workflows to improve patient and clinician use experiences and to minimize change management issues. SBR Health will also describe how they are working closely with many leading healthcare providers to pilot and deploy innovative approaches to overcome existing issues with televideo technologies that are preventing their widespread adoption and scale-up to larger patient populations.

Bio

Chris Herot is the CEO and co-founder of SBR Health. Prior to launching SBR in 2010, Chris was Chief Product Officer at VSee Lab, a provider of high quality, low bandwidth and low cost videoconferencing solutions to enterprises and governments. Chris has been a successful business and technology leader in several high growth companies, and directed the advanced technology group for several years at Lotus Development (now IBM) where he was responsible for video, mobile and real-time communications solutions.

Chris received his BS and MS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was on the faculty of the group that became the MIT Media Laboratory.

Areas of expertise include: