Maimonides Medical Center Takes First Step in Pioneering Telemedicine Initiative With Verizon Business

Maimonides Medical Center Takes First Step in Pioneering Telemedicine Initiative With Verizon Business

Maimonides Medical Center is one step closer to realizing the future promise of telemedicine. Maimonides turned to Verizon Business to design and deploy a high-capacity, resilient optical network connecting the medical center’s main campus buildings and 24 remote locations throughout Brooklyn. The new network, which Maimonides began to transition to in March, enables the secure and rapid transmission of electronic medical records, providing physicians at Maimonides and affiliated institutions with complete patient medical histories, including doctors’ orders, prescriptions, lab results and radiology films.

By eliminating the cumbersome process of transferring paper records between physicians and among various health care facilities, Maimonides hopes to reduce medical errors, eliminate duplicative testing and deliver improved patient care at a lower cost – providing critical, comprehensive clinical information directly at the point of care.

“Immediate access to electronic patient records can help enhance the speed and efficiency of health care as we know it today,” said Walter Fahey, chief information officer at Maimonides. “Working with Verizon Business, we’re on the road to making traditional clipboards and paper records obsolete. The new network supports our current requirements and provides a secure and scalable platform for our future initiatives.”

The new Maimonides network will also serve as the foundation for the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange (BHIE), a regional health care network scheduled for launch in 2008. Designed to meet the federal call to action to transform the delivery of health care through regional collaboration, the BHIE will aid the development of electronic medical records and promote interconnectedness among Brooklyn-based clinicians. The BHIE will spur the adoption of a common health care information technology supported by shared policies, and privacy and security standards designed to create a sustainable business model.

Read the complete Press Release