One good customer service idea can spawn another! Recently I saw an example of how a remote hospital is making an effort to improve the quality of service to their customers (patients). Ross McGowan of the KTVU program “Mornings On Two” (a local morning news show here in the San Francisco Bay Area) interviewed Dr. Steve Vargas, the Healdsburg, CA Hospital Chief of Staff. Since the hospital is not in a major metropolitan area, there are not a large number of specialists on hand as you would normally see at a large hospital. To help fill this gap, and provide better service to their patients they use a robot that acts as a remote consultant. Several hospitals around the country have deployed these Remote Presence on-call robots. The robot has a head that is a television screen with a camera attached to the top. The remote doctor is displayed live via an Internet connection on the TV screen and interacts with the patient. The remote doctor and the patient can each see and hear each other via the robot. During the interview, Dr. Jim Finn, a critical care specialist, was controlling the robot. Dr. Finn was physically in Santa Rosa, CA but could interact with patients in the smaller Healdsburg Hospital.

The physician manning the mobile robot has access to electronic medical records and electronic x-ray records and the high-resolution camera can actually see the readouts of various machines in the patients room. The robot has a powerful stethoscope and can even see images from fiber-optic scopes used to examine the nose and throat. Imagine an emergency surgery scenario in a small hospital where a specialist is needed for consultation during a surgery but it would take hours or days for the doctor to physically travel to the location where the surgery is taking place. Apparently patients have been reacting positively to the doctor on the screen as a human being (which of course he/she is, just remote!).

Congratulations to the people involved in this and similar RP (remote presence) projects around the world. You used imagination to improve the quality of care to your patients who are also your customers. There are obviously many other applications for this technology to improve customer service. Check out Intouch Health for more details on remote presence.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 10:07 am and is filed under Service Tools, Service in the News, Service Tips, Service Extras, Outsourcing Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.