IXC brings big medicine to small communities

Telemedicine applications supplier VidiMedix will ally with IXC Communications to offer Internet-based medicine in real time.

The alliance will let small and medium-sized health care providers use IXC's national OC-48 (2.4 Gb/s) network with VidiMedix's forthcoming Series 2000 product to set up videoconferences between doctors and patients. Among the applications possible are examining X-rays and electrocardiograms over the Web, monitoring life support equipment and listening to a patient's heart and lungs with an Internet protocol stethoscope.

"We normally link group practices and small clinics to larger, specialized health care organizations such as the Baylor Presbyterian Hospital's Texas Back Institute in Dallas," said Tom Campbell, VidiMedix's telemedicine program director. "We also foresee a large market in second opinions from leading institutions."

Transmitting an X-ray over POTS lines can take up to 20 minutes. "The transmission speed of IXC's Gemini2000 network is the real cost-effective element here," Campbell said. "IXC has focused on vertical markets, they have the high bandwidth and the reliability, and they understand health care and how to bring bandwidth into the examination room."

IXC's hierarchical architecture for Gemini 2000 places core routers-fully meshed to the Internet-in eight key regions: Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Chicago; Dallas; New York; Newark, Del.; San Francisco; and Washington. The system directs dial-up calls in each region to its router and then to the one closest to its destination. The result is fewer hops and optimized network performance, said Doug Kellermann, IXC's vice president for value-added Internet services. Additionally, the network reduces latency and adds redundancy communication as critical as telemedicine.

The IXC network came on-line last April and now constitutes 9300 route miles of optical fiber and four of the core routers. The company expects to bring up the remaining routers this year and extend its fiber total to 15,000 route miles by the end of 1999.

IXC also operates two Web hosting centers in Austin and Newark and may eventually host the Web site that is at the heart of the VidiMedix application.

VidiMedix's products link remote clinics and physicians to large medical institutions with multimedia functions. Physicians can whiteboard, receive lab test results in several formats, and transmit prescriptions and legal documents using VidiMedix's electronic signature function and 64-bit encryption on locally distributed files.

"Medicine on the Internet has mostly meant providing information," Campbell said. "We're providing full interactive health care services to group practice organizations and small institutions. We want our customers to become the Amazon.coms of health care." The Series 1000 application currently has 10 clients subscribing over leased lines, including the national network of Shriners Hospitals for Children offering pediatric burn care. Series 2000 is in beta tests now in selected sites, including a pediatric burn unit in Cyprus for victims of the conflict in Kosovo. It will come to market by the third quarter, Campbell said.