Jeff Ingle, right, and Scott King have patient B.J. Young take a test drive through the eVideon system, an interactive television set hospitals are using to educate patients about specific treatments and provide information they will need during the recovery stage.

Hospital televisions not so dumb anymore
Pete Daly

A traditional television in a patient’s hospital room is “basically a dumb device,” according to Scott King, director of converged technology at Optimal Solutions in Wyoming.

He’s not denigrating television programming in general. By “dumb,” he means a television that can’t run applications from a computer or stream video and that doesn’t allow the viewer to communicate with the hospital staff.

But the televisions in a lot of hospital rooms around the country are getting smarter due to companies like Optimal Solutions, which is marketing its eVideon Healthcare IPTV system beyond Grand Rapids.

The eVideon system, which is installed in Metro Health and some of the Spectrum hospitals so far, is an IPTV view-on-demand system that King says provides improved entertainment and very useful information to the hospital patient, while at the same time sending useful information back to the hospital staff about that patient.

IPTV stands for Internet protocol TV. It is digital and completely contained in the hospital’s IT database, and none of the IPTV content is delivered over a traditional cable TV system — not even the channels the patient is surfing.

The “view-on-demand” part refers to the ability of a person to order a movie to watch on television instantly.

“What we have provided them with is true video on demand,” said Jeff Ingle, president and owner of Optimal Solutions.

Another major use of eVideon is for educating patients about preparing for a specific treatment or procedure they are scheduled to undergo, as well as information about what the patient will need to do in the recovery stage. Other information IPTV offers a patient is as basic as what’s cooking in the hospital cafeteria for the edification of the patient’s visitors.

eVideon also enables the patient to respond to the hospital staff: Patient satisfaction surveys can be easily and quickly completed using the in-room TV, and the hospital cafeteria can take orders for room service meals for visitors.

Because the hospital database is the source of the eVideon content, the television in a new patient’s room can greet him or her by name — audibly — the first time that patient turns on the TV, according to Ingle. That introduction could be accompanied by a taped message from the hospital CEO or one from the patient’s friends or relatives.

“We also know why you are there,” said Ingle, so the informational videos about the treatment destined for that patient automatically is set for delivery to the patient. “That stays with you the whole time you are in the hospital,” said King. “If you get transferred to another (room), eVideon knows that.”

IPTV is not limited to patient rooms. Staff areas within the hospital would also be part of the network so that employees could benefit from its communications potential. In-service training sessions could be taped and available on-demand to staff who missed the live session.

Optimal Solutions is a software company formed in 1993 by Ingle and now located at 1055 Gezon Parkway. The company has roughly 20 employees.

eVideon is Optimal Solutions’ second product introduced to the IPTV industry, according to Ingle. The first was eVideon Education, which was released in 2002 for use in schools, making it much easier for a teacher to show the class a video or educational material. eVideon Healthcare came out in 2007; it was already installed in the new Metro Health Hospital in Wyoming when it opened that year, not far from Optimal Solutions’ location.

eVideon Healthcare was ready to go in the new Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital when Spectrum Health opened that facility earlier this year, and will be added in Blodgett and Butterworth patient rooms soon.

There are competitors providing interactive television systems for hospitals, but Ingle said Optimal Solutions is “the only one that does this along the data network, and have read and write (capability) into other (computer) systems of the hospital.”

Ingle would not reveal the cost of installing an eVideon Healthcare system, nor the annual revenues of the privately held company.

King said a challenge to installation of an IPTV system would be lack of a network jack or port on the wall behind the patient’s television. That situation could require installation of some cabling.

Ingle said patients who have had an IPTV in their hospital rooms tend to report a higher level of satisfaction with their hospital care than those without IPTV. Because of that, the marketing strategy behind eVideon is to target hospitals that have had low patient satisfaction scores, he said.

“The problem we have is, people don’t know who we are,” said Ingle. “We do pretty well on Google, but we’re not a household name yet.”

Optimal Solutions is trying to market eVideon Healthcare all over the U.S., according to Ingle and King, and is concentrating on four states in particular, which they would not name.

“We are starting two new eVideon Healthcare projects later this summer, one at a military base and another in a community hospital,” Ingle said. He added that there are many more on the horizon.

According to its website, Optimal Solutions’ engineering division is wrapping up installation of more than 250 new Axis IP surveillance cameras at Dexter Community Schools. The H.264 cameras are being centrally managed by five new servers running the OnSSI NetDVMS platform.

The company is also in the final phase of deploying a new Enterasys wired and wireless network at Zeeland Public Schools, which will serve as the foundation for Zeeland’s upcoming initiatives, including IP surveillance and 1:1 computing.

Ingle began his career as a public school teacher. He taught secondary choral music at Northview and choral music and computers at East Grand Rapids.