The new system is designed to improve the patient experience and manage video requirements within the hospital. It is a key part of Project FutureCare, which is currently undergoing an upgrade and renovation project in medical institutions. The five-year project has a budget of US$250 million and a new 240,000-square-foot tower will open in February 2021. This new facility has a new lobby-style drop-off point and an improved wayfinding system. It also provides a larger single patient room that combines family area space with technology.
During the design phase, Jeni Connelly, Overlake's IT senior project manager and technical lead for the new building, realized that the new IPTV system could serve as a catalyst to improve the patient experience in the medical center: "We evaluated our old video system-mainly based on coaxial Cable TV – and realize that it does not support the indoor entertainment experience we want to provide patients," she said. "The New East Tower project gives us the opportunity to improve this situation. We decided to choose the IPTV system because we think it will be the ideal solution to solve our'patient experience' dilemma and meet our daily video needs."
The IPTV system needs to integrate 350 wards, as well as video walls in public areas and entrance halls, into a centralized management and supervision network. The hospital also hopes to upgrade its existing cable TV system to include video-on-demand (VoD) services, while giving patients quick access to information and educational videos and other internal content.
Neurilink, located in Boise, Idaho (with an office in Seattle), was selected as the AV system integrator for the project and began work in March 2020. The company worked with Exterity to design an IPTV system that can meet the different needs of hospitals, staff and patients alike.
The system includes a 4TB management server that hosts all applications and devices on the system, including VoD services and recordings, as well as internal custom channels, including a patient education VoD library. Hollywood movies can also be used for patient entertainment, and Pro:Idiom encrypted video is directly streamed to medical-grade SmartTV. The system also combines ATSC and QAM gateways to capture cable TV and OTA (over the air) channels to supplement VoD and use the hospital's existing radio frequency system when needed. In addition, the AvediaStream m9605 media player powers the video wall in the lobby and provides the ability to display 4K video and detailed graphics (up to 4K, 60fps).
Each new ward contains a hospital-grade display with a user interface customized by the team. For convenience, the menu is navigated via the "Nurse Call" pillow-type speaker remote control, so the patient can be fully controlled by just one device.
The Exterity IPTV solution means that Overlake can provide patients and employees with managed access to different categories of content through a simplified system-whether it is VoD, internal video, proprietary programming or OTA broadcast. The hospital has significantly improved the patient experience and created higher value for all its stakeholders.