HOW WE DO IT - Case Studies

General Dynamics Canada

General Dynamics Canada Ltd. is an international supplier of Land, Airborne, and Maritime defense electronics. Integrated Telehealth Solutions (ITS) is a commercial division of General Dynamics Canada specializing in telemedicine. The ITS telemedicine workstation is a medical videoconferencing system and multimedia capture, transfer, and review station equipped with a wide range of medical imaging devices. It provides both interactive real-time telemedicine and off-line "store-and-forward" telemedicine involving the exchange of multimedia patient files with high-resolution x-ray scans, digital photos, audio clips, and more.

General Dynamics Canada engaged Quadrus to web-enable its Telehealth study archive so that medical professionals could, for the first time, gain access to patient information and provide off-line consultations via the Internet. The ability to digitize, transfer, review, and store x-rays and other medical information has significantly impacted the healthcare system—saving costs, shortening diagnoses time, and ultimately improving patient care.

Today, specialists must travel to remote locations to make diagnoses, or sick patients must travel to urban areas. Support collateral such as x-ray films must be sent by courier or mail. Conversely, with this new custom-designed web-based solution, doctors will have quick and easy access to critical patient information from anywhere over the web. A doctor will simply log onto the designated website, search the Telehealth archive, view the x-rays, video-, audio- or text-based patient information and save his text-based notes via the web interface. Protecting patient confidentiality is of utmost concern when transferring digital medical files of this nature—and Quadrus was successful in developing a solution that is both secure and private.  

Although this innovation's full impact on the medical industry has yet to be seen, significant improvements in healthcare logistics and rural diagnoses are anticipated. As for General Dynamics Canada, it hopes the use of this technology will widen to become the industry standard over time while improving the care and level of medical expertise provided to rural or isolated patients.