Secure Telehealth Partners with Nefsis for Telepsychiatry Delivery

Read full-length story as published in Health Management Technology

Secure Telehealth is a Pittsburgh-based company that provides secure online services to the behavioral health community. The service is used to connect a physician at one location with a consumer under supervision at another location. These locations may be thousands of miles apart. Psychiatric evaluations, medical checks, and other procedures are conducted remotely.

Secure Telehealth sought a secure video conferencing solution to connect patients to physicians in geographically dispersed areas, without installing complex hardware components such as MCUs, gateways, and servers.

Problem: Secure Telehealth required a secure, high-quality video conferencing system to serve as a virtual meeting room between patients and physicians in dispersed locations.

Solution: Nefsis, a cloud-based — no infrastructure required — multipoint HD video conferencing online service. Nefsis SSL/TLS encryption for all web, VoIP, and video data communications.

Business and IT Benefits: Nefsis technology provided the highest-quality video over a variety of Internet connection types, achieving the goal of fully-interactive sessions. Nefsis cloud computing eliminated on-premise infrastructure equipment. Lower-cost, widely available online services opens door to any-sized healthcare practice. Nefsis proved easy to implement and use, with minimal doctor and patient training.

After much research, Secure Telehealth chose to partner with Nefsis, a cloud-based video conferencing provider. Cloud computing provides on-demand services over the Internet, using shared vendor resources in the “cloud,” as opposed to installing complex equipment at each customer location. This approach allowed Secure Telehealth to deliver secure video conferencing sessions to any behavioral health practice with Internet access and a laptop or desktop computer.

Seeking a Reliable, Secure Solution

Security was another major requirement that Secure Telehealth weighed heavily in their decision. Nefsis uses industry standard SSL/TLS encryption, end-to-end, for all conference data, including any live sharing, VoIP and multiparty video. In addition, Nefsis provides proxy and firewall traversal, for conferencing among participants located at hospitals and large-sized practices where proxy servers are prevalent.

Secure Telehealth physicians invite participating clinics and patients to join them in their Nefsis meeting room by sending a web link via email. Conference participants just click on the web link to join the online meeting. Nefsis automatically connects everyone to the same virtual conference server for the remainder of the session.

Typically, Secure Telehealth physicians schedule clients every thirty minutes. Fifteen minutes are spent with the client on camera and fifteen minutes are spent on follow-up actions such as typing patient notes into the HER software program and prescribing medications.

"Telepsychiatry is an effective way to provide access to psychiatric care for individuals living in underserved areas," says Jim Mountain, president of Secure Telehealth. "It has become one of the most successful of all the telemedicine application because its practitioners don’t need to touch their patients to treat them. We have found web-based video conferencing to be an effective service-delivery method."

To learn more about Nefsis, contact us, schedule a live demo or start your own FREE trial right now.