Category: Health & Performance

The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) have utilised the medio.link secure video conferencing platform to hold meetings with stakeholders from NHS sites.
The RCP, a leading health organisation which aims to improve patient care and prevent disease worldwide, represents 37,000 doctors globally and needed a reliable video platform after struggling to hold virtual meetings which were of a consistent quality.
Ben Pain, Head of Audio-visual, Technical and Media Services at RCP, describes the organisations issues before they implemented medio.link. “We were using a variety of video platforms at the RCP, but we struggled with delivering calls of a consistent quality with stakeholders, who were joining us from their places of work. This was largely because the majority of our stakeholders work within the NHS and the approach to video calling technology and network security differs at each trust.”
As a result of the issues with reliability, the RCP looked for a new video conferencing platform. “Our key requirement was interoperability,” says Ben. “We chose medio.link because we feel it provides the most reliable way for us to collaborate with our family of clinicians and medical professionals, regardless of the preferred technology within their local place of work.”

The medio.link Platform
medio.link is a secure, reliable video conferencing platform designed specifically for the NHS and healthcare. The service is the most secure video calling platform in UK healthcare, boasting HSCN/N3 compliance and 99.999% reliability.
“We have found medio.link easy to use, because it is well designed and integrates easily with Skype for Business,” says Ben. “It’s very popular with our staff because it’s so reliable.”
“Previously, connecting stakeholders from different NHS sites was arduous and often frustrating work, but medio.link saves us time. The reliability of medio means our stakeholders feel more confident contributing virtually, which means less time away from their place of work,” says Ben.
“The team at Involve have been very helpful and have been able to accommodate some much larger meetings than we would usually hold. We’ve had up to 60 doctors on one call using medio.link. Involve and medio.link are ideal for any organisation for who, interoperability and simple functionality is the priority. Whether it’s SIP, IP, Skype, WebRTC, telephone or even ISDN, we know medio.link can handle it.”

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The Nottingham Auditory Implant Programme (NAIP) is a nationally recognised centre for auditory implantation, providing cochlear implants and other hearing implants to hearing-impaired children and adults.
Their rehabilitation support model for children is one where clinicians see them in their everyday environment at home or school with family and local support professionals, and Virtual Clinics were implemented to improve the children’s communication skills and provide coaching to those close to the child, to change the mindset whereby the only way that the child can progress is in the hands of the ‘experts’ at the specialist centre.
Jayne Ramirez Inscoe, Advanced Specialist in Communication for the NAIP discusses the experience of introducing and using Virtual Clinics within the programme, “we were the first team within our large teaching hospital to request help in setting up virtual clinics for our patients, carers and local support professionals. We were introduced to Involve by our NHS Trust corporate ICT team, who recognised that Involve had successfully supported the introduction of virtual clinics in other NHS teams, so we were confident that their systems complied with NHS information governance standards and patient confidentiality and safety. The Involve team are very approachable, attentive and offer practical solutions. They have a good understanding of the obstacles and barriers of current NHS ICT systems and the primary aim of patient safety. Ben, of Involve, has continued to offer support whenever needed”.
Virtual Clinic is a video and audio calling platform designed by Involve, a leading provider of digital health solutions for the NHS. Virtual Clinic enables clinicians to schedule secure and confidential video consultations with their patients using the online booking portal, and the platform sits within the NHS N3 network with connectivity to HSCN, meaning every Virtual Clinic is completely secure, whether it is a video conference between two people within the NHS network, or users outside of the network at home using the Internet or even 4G data users.

“If they have the necessary computer and internet technology, most patients, parents, local professionals are interested in Virtual Clinics for certain appointments in the rehabilitation pathway. For some older children and their parents, it has been the best way for the child to ‘speak for themselves’, to develop communication independence, to practice conversation breakdown and repair strategies and to become competent using a telecommunication method which is used widely by both hearing and deaf people across the world: video calling.”
The primary aim of cochlear implantation is for the patients to improve their listening and communication skills, and virtual clinics present them with real-life challenges, opportunities to develop conversation skills and to practice clarification and repair strategies which will help them in everyday situations in the future. Jayne discusses how the use of Virtual Clinic has benefitted the children’s communication skills, “during a home visit, children may be harder to engage, and both children and parents can become distracted. Virtual Clinic offers a way to have shorter and more focused sessions, whilst still having the benefit of seeing the child in their home environment, thus getting a representative picture of everyday behaviour.”
“There have been further benefits through using Virtual Clinics, such as Deaf parents who may require a BSL interpreter or who live far from their child’s school for the deaf have found virtual clinics an effective way to communicate with the clinicians. Time and money have been saved by both the patients and the Trust, but the benefits from having supportive conversations over Virtual Clinics have been the greatest gain to date.”
“Our plans are to continue to expand the number of patients being offered the choice of Virtual Clinic, including with adult patients and to use more regularly with children to monitor progress between re-assessment face-to-face visits. We would and have already recommended Involve’s Virtual Clinic solution to other NHS organisations.”
To find out more about Virtual Clinic, visit our Virtual Clinic page or get in touch now. Keep your eye out for part 2 of this case study, which is an in-depth look into one person’s experience of using Virtual Clinic.

NHS England have asked hospitals to carry out more video-based consultations to help reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus.
COVID-19 is a new illness which affects your lungs and airways. It is thought to be spread by cough droplets, like similar viruses, so people who may have the virus are self-isolating to avoid contact with other humans.
This self-isolating has caused a huge rise in remote working, especially in China, where offices are closed to curb the spread of the virus and the only option is for people to work from home.
Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chief executive describes the rise in remote working due to COVID-19 as “opportunities created by the forces of change. The crisis is a very, very big challenge to the society but also… gives people a chance to try a new way of living and new way of working”.
The NHS is a perfect example of how remote working can be vital until the coronavirus pandemic is over. Reducing the number of people attending their GP Surgery or hospital whenever possible not only increases infection control, it also reduces the pressure on these services during a time when they will be strained due to patients infected with COVID-19.
Video-based consultations, or Virtual Consultation is not a new concept, however they may be seeing their biggest surge in use ever, due to the ‘opportunity created by the forces of change’, presented by COVID-19.
As initially reported by the BBC, “Hospitals are being asked to carry out more video-based consultations of patients to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus. NHS England hopes the move will reduce the number of people in hospitals and lower the potential for transmission.”
How medio.link can help
medio.link provides the NHS and private healthcare market with the UK’s most secure and reliable video and audio meeting platform. We are proud that our platform has helped the NHS to achieve:
Over 30,000 clinical meetings via video & audio
Over 76,000 meeting participants using medio.link
600 days, 15,000 hours and 850,000 minutes of usage across the NHS

Using Virtual Clinics for Speech and Language Therapy
By Jayne Ramirez Inscoe, Advanced Specialist in Communication, Nottingham Auditory Implant Programme
H was 15 years old when he was re-referred to the Nottingham Auditory Implant Programme (NAIP). His hearing loss had deteriorated to the point where the best acoustic hearing aids could not provide him with adequate hearing for speech.
Living with his family in Hereford, he understood that he would have to miss school and study time and travel to and from Nottingham in order to receive cochlear implants, during the year running up to his GCSE preparation. As a teenager, we knew that H himself would need to be motivated in order to achieve his potential with the new cochlear implant technology.
Whilst waiting for the operation, H proudly showed me his new smartphone, which he could not use to make conventional phone calls as he could not hear effectively, however we discussed some of the innovative ways that NAIP and the implant manufacturers were trialling internet applications for patients to check and control what they were hearing, and how virtual clinics were being used as an alternative to face-to-face appointments for some patients. H was highly motivated and interested in using these applications himself.
Over the first 6 months, clinicians offered rehab support at school and in the clinic. H needed to learn to trust the increased access to speech afforded by his cochlear implant technology. He continued to mishear and misperceive words, particularly in challenging listening conditions and needed to remember to clarify what had been said. H was interested in trying a virtual clinic at home out of school hours for subsequent rehab appointments, avoiding the need for him to miss lessons.
The impact of implementing Virtual Clinic 
Virtual Clinic allowed the clinician to have a dialogue with H about how things were going, meaning his parents could observe how he was able to speak for himself, ask and answer questions and to cope with communication breakdown and repair. By using Virtual Clinic, H was able to use his excellent lip-reading to support his listening, and he gained the confidence to make more video calls with family and friends as an alternative to conventional phone calls.
The clinician has been able to monitor H’s progress with his cochlear implants and offer advice as effectively as face-to-face visits, saving travel time and costs for both the clinician and the family. But the biggest gains have been in H’s increased independence, use of effective communication strategies and ability to make video calls with family and friends. H hopes to study Drama in the future, and the skills he has developed using Virtual Clinic will be essential for a successful career.

Involve have provided United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (ULH), one of the biggest acute hospital trusts in England, with state-of-the-art MDT rooms with medio.link connectivity across multiple sites. The trust, whose vision is to provide ‘excellence in rural healthcare’, has three hospitals which need to collaborate to provide the best patient-centred care possible for more than 720,000 people.
John Minett, Telecoms Engineer at ULH, said: “We already had three MDT rooms across three of the sites, but they were in need of an upgrade. The equipment was outdated and had become unreliable, and the cost to support the solution had become too expensive. We wanted a more modern solution which allowed us to view medical images and communicate, with a user-friendly system.
“We have a long-standing relationship with Involve and have been really pleased solutions they have provided us in the past, so when they answered our tender by offering us a cost-effective solution which met all of our needs, we were happy to choose Involve as our supplier for this project.”
As a trusted partner of ULH, Involve’s Healthcare team consulted the Trust’s ICT and Cancer Services department, to redesign and upgrade three key clinical and operation rooms (MDTs) across the three main hospital sites. Involve’s highly skilled engineering team installed multiple large format professional 65” HD 1080p displays in the MDT rooms and Cisco videoconferencing was deployed across all rooms, plus a host of other equipment to make a first-class MDT room.
All of these rooms are connected to Involve’s N3 hosted service platform, medio.link, with integrated multiparty conferencing capabilities. The systems are controlled by an intuitive control system and a customised interface, with simplicity for users at its heart. A range of existing clinical systems and imaging was integrated into the design and build, enabling two-way content sharing of data with any internal and external sites, allowing multiple participants to join regardless of location and device they connected with, and still see video and content.

The Trust have been using both medio.link, powered by Involve, and BT Engage to provide video and audio connectivity to their MDT rooms.
John added: “We have had meetings with the clinicians who use the MDT rooms about when the BT service is switched off this year, and the feedback from them is that they wish to use medio.link as the main video conferencing platform as it works well and is a good alternative to BT Engage. We would recommend Involve and medio.link, and we regularly do recommend medio.link to other Trusts.”
Speaking about the new solution and how it has benefited the Trust, John said: “The solution is much more reliable than the one we had before, there are significantly fewer breakdowns and the support Involve offers is great so we know if there is a breakdown it will be well-handled. The solution is also much more user-friendly, which meets our initial objectives so we’re happy with the work Involve have done.”
To find out more about the medio.link MDT video service, visit our MDT page or get in touch.