ViTel Net, MGH MD PnP Program Collaborate to Support SmartAmerica Challenge

McLean, VA, June 03, 2014 -- ViTel Net, a pioneer in the telemedicine/telehealth industry, is joining forces with the MGH MD PnP research program, a leader in developing advanced integrated clinical environments, to support the SmartAmerica Challenge for healthcare, a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow project.

On June 11, 2014, 24 teams from more than 100 organizations will come together in Washington, D.C. to showcase their technologies in eight challenge areas. ViTel Net and MD PnP will link ViTel Net’s adaptable cross-platform telehealth solution with MD PnP’s Medical Device “Plug-and-Play” open platform to generate and stream the test physiological and device data that will be used by the healthcare teams to demonstrate their innovative ideas and approaches and support a SmartAmerica “app challenge”.

“Our current healthcare system is comprised of a loose collection of devices and applications that typically are not interoperable and require manual interventions to connect data. This lack of integration and coordination creates inefficiencies and potentially dangerous conditions,” says Robert M. Kolodner, vice president and chief medical officer of ViTel Net and former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“With a proven history of success in the evolving field of telehealth, ViTel Net is uniquely positioned to maximize value from ongoing technological advances,” he says. “We are delighted to be collaborating with MD PnP on this project and look forward to assisting the SmartAmerica Challenge for healthcare.”

ViTel Net enables providers to deliver better quality care and patients to receive their care more conveniently and affordably using telehealth solutions that connect them remotely with one another—anytime, anywhere across the continuum of care. ViTel Net uses its powerful and highly adaptable telehealth technologies to deliver customized telehealth solutions that are easy-to-use, highly scalable, and can quickly adapt to meet the rapidly changing needs of healthcare delivery.

The MD PnP Program provides national clinical leadership and technology expertise to a growing portfolio of collaborators in the domain of medical device interoperability. The Federally-funded research program provides standards development leadership to support medical device interoperability and an open-source test bed of device drivers and integration tools called “OpenICE” that can be used to enable the cost-effective development of innovative third-party medical “apps” for treatment, research, safety and quality improvements, equipment management, and adverse event detection and reporting when using networked medical devices for clinical care.

“We have been working to accelerate the adoption of medical device interoperability by providing building blocks (use cases, standards, a neutral lab test bed environment, and open research tools) and by changing clinical and market expectations of what can be achieved,” notes Julian M. Goldman, MD, director of the MD PnP program, attending anesthesiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and medical director of Partners HealthCare Biomedical Engineering.

For more information about ViTel Net and its services, please visit http://www.vitelnet.com. Additionally, please visit http://www.mdpnp.org for more information about MD PnP.

# # #

About ViTel Net (http://www.vitelnet.com)

Since the early 1990s, ViTel Net has pioneered the development of high-quality, adaptable telemedicine/telehealth technologies that allow clinicians to remotely treat and manage patient health regardless of geographic and time barriers. Through its unique technologies, ViTel Net offers a broad range of standard and configurable telehealth solutions for use in remote consultation, diagnosis and monitoring as well as remote care delivery.

Today, ViTel Net strives to break down telehealth barriers to allow patient treatment and health management in a variety of real-time scenarios. While the scenarios for telemedicine are innumerable and evolving, the ViTel Net team has solid experience developing and implementing turnkey solutions around the globe. As a world leader in developing telehealth technologies for both the commercial and government sectors, we build long-term relationships with leading healthcare systems, hospitals, clinics, government agencies, and healthcare providers globally.

About MD PnP (http://www.mdpnp.org)

The Medical Device "Plug-and-Play" (MD PnP) Interoperability Program is promoting innovation in patient safety and clinical care by leading the adoption of patient-centric integration of medical devices and IT systems in clinical environments. For the past decade the MD PnP Program has provided standards development leadership to support medical device interoperability, shared interoperability procurement language for hospitals (MD FIRE), an open platform and tools to evaluate existing standards and to deploy clinical apps (OpenICE), an FDA Pre-IDE Submission to clarify the regulatory pathway for interoperable medical device systems, and an Interoperability Lab “test bed” and tools as a shared national resource. The program has established extensive collaborative relationships with industry, academia, standards development organizations, and federal agencies, and online communication tools such as a website, code repository, and discussion site.

About Massachusetts General Hospital (http://www.massgeneral.org)

Founded in 1811, the Massachusetts General Hospital is the oldest and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The 957-bed medical center each year admits almost 48,500 inpatients, handles more than 1.6 million visits to its extensive outpatient programs at the main campus and four health centers, and records more than 95,700 emergency visits. The surgical staff perform more than 41,000 operations annually, and the MGH Vincent Obstetrics Service delivers about 3,700 babies a year. The largest nongovernment employer in the city of Boston, the MGH has more than 23,000 employees, including almost 4,000 registered nurses. MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of more than $785 million. MGH and Brigham and Women's Hospital are founding members of Partners HealthCare System, a Boston-based integrated health care delivery system. In 2003, MGH became the first hospital in the state to be awarded Magnet designation by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. The MGH is consistently ranked among the nation’s top hospitals by US News and World Report.