How Education And Health-care Are Being Transformed Via Video Conferencing

How Education And Health-care Are Being Transformed Via Video Conferencing

As detailed in the now available Forbes Insights report, “The Connected Culture: Unleashing the Power of Video in Everyday Collaboration,” almost wherever applied, video conferencing delivers enormous business benefits. Companies taking an enterprise-wide approach to the technology are reporting significant improvements in everything from team performance and employee engagement to stronger relationships with external stakeholders, including customers, suppliers and partners.

But for certain industries, the promise of video conferencing goes beyond the support of fundamental relationships and work-flows to inject transformational levels of innovation and efficiency to core products and services. Consider two such areas of endeavor where the nature of the business activity requires inherently live as well as visual interaction: health-care and education.

Health-care Reimagined

As the expression goes, doctors, nurses and similar health-care professionals hold office hours so that they can “see” their patients. That means, barring some “other” innovation or solution, one side or the other needs to travel. Naturally, this is an industry standing to benefit uniquely and profoundly from greater use of live video conferencing.

Health-care counselors, for example, can conduct a range of activities—initial consultations, remote diagnoses, periodic check-ins, etc., using video conferencing. To the extent telemedicine of this nature can be accomplished using readily available devices such as smart-phones or laptops, the benefits grow exponentially.

For starters, video conferencing can in many instances “eliminate the need to go into a doctor’s office for care.” This can be remarkably valuable both for health-care professionals and for patients who may be working in congested cities with heavy traffic. Alternatively, such tools can enable greater efficiency and coverage “in remote areas” lacking adequate access to providers. Overall, ready access to flexible, reliable, device-agnostic video conferencing can leverage the value of physicians, counselors and other staff almost immeasurably.

Leveraging The Educator  

Few activities stand to gain as much from video conferencing as education.  For centuries prior, the value of any lecture was accessible only to those in attendance—or perhaps those who later on might receive lecture notes (not nearly the same value as having “been there”).

But today, with the advent of broadly accessible, cost-effective and easy-to-use video conferencing, a single lecturer in any single lecture hall can be leveraged across an unlimited number of campuses, other lecture halls and view screens. Moreover, content can be broadcasted live or recorded for later viewing or review.

Overall, the educators and students “love” the outcomes. Enterprise grade video conferencing is now bringing educational opportunities to more people while maintaining “high-quality engagement and collaboration.” It’s perfect for guest lecturers or students who simply can’t attend class in person.