Cradlepoint is helping Children’s Mercy Hospital connect its doctors to patients and deliver specialized care to some of the most remote locations in the Midwest. Children’s Mercy is the only free-standing children’s hospital between St. Louis and Denver, so it serves a massive geographic footprint where patients may not always be able to travel to its facilities and instead require telemedicine services. Cradlepoint provides the hospital with consistent, reliable LTE connectivity for medical teleconferencing and remote visits to patients’ homes. Cradlepoint also enables secure, reliable VPN functionality to transmit patient data and remain HIPAA compliant. With Cradlepoint in the network, Children’s Mercy is able to efficiently deliver its specialized patient care in more places and to more patients than ever before.
Our telemedicine services supported by LTE connectivity have alleviated one of the largest barriers to improving access to specialty care,” said Morgan Waller, director of Telemedicine at Children’s Mercy. “When our team discusses plans for highly-specialized healthcare to be provided virtually in the homes of children and youth with complex needs, sufficient and reliable internet service has to be a given. If we propose a partnership with a community facility that wants to bring specialized pediatric care to the patients they serve, we do not want firewalls, weak networks, port configuration, routing, access points or available wall jacks to be a threat. Our LTE connected network can improve access and quality of care while being sensitive to the cost of healthcare.”
Telemedicine is the best option for many of the Children’s Mercy patients, so the hospital utilizes web-based software that supports remote devices and applications such as stethoscopes, otoscopes, and diagnostic examination cameras. When the need for and demand of specialty services via telemedicine grew to include patients’ homes, the telemedicine team knew it could not deliver using its legacy consumer-grade solution for portable internet. The slow speeds, unreliable video quality, and potential for dropped calls did not meet the hospital’s standards for quality. Cradlepoint helps Children’s Mercy eliminate these issues by creating a portable telemedicine unit featuring Cradlepoint’s compact LTE routers and VPN solutions. The hospital now realizes high reliability, improved bandwidth, and small form factor that makes the telemedicine unit easy to deploy, mount, and manage. The always-on real-time video conferencing and diagnostics enable medical personnel to deliver specialized services such as acute, preventive and palliative care for medically complex children that otherwise would not be possible.
For hospitals like Children’s Mercy where telemedicine is sometimes the only means of connecting with critically ill patients, having reliable and always-connected network access should never be something doctors or patients have to worry about. Cradlepoint ensures that healthcare professionals can consistently make those connections to their patients, focus on providing the best healthcare, all while securely transmitting patient data to remain HIPAA compliant,” said Ian Pennell, chief marketing officer, Cradlepoint. “Leveraging the always-on capabilities of LTE connectivity gives Children’s Mercy unbridled freedom to provide the specialized and personalized lifesaving care its doctors are trained for.”
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