While eVideon is most known for our Patient Experience (PX) Platform, believe it or not, there was a time when working in hospitals wasn’t even a concept for us. I started my journey as a systems integrator. I was always interested in video delivery on a network. When I started at eVideon, we were developing a system for K-12 schools to deliver streaming video for teachers and students to use on demand in the classroom. 

Think about that - the concept of video education to supplement the hands-on interaction teachers have with students. Of course we know that people - adults and children - have different learning styles and ways they digest important information. A teacher’s job is to prepare a student for life outside the classroom so they can succeed. But think about a nurse’s job. They prepare patients for life outside the hospital in much the same way. And just like students, patients learn at different paces and in different ways. 

So, many years ago, when a local hospital approached us to see if our video delivery platform would work in their forthcoming replacement hospital, we took a serious look. It certainly seemed logical. In our educational endeavors we had developed solutions with higher ed organizations - schools of nursing and speech pathology - to help deliver nursing simulation sessions. Furthermore, hospitals had pretty modernized networks back then (the early 2000s) and could certainly support streaming video. Was it really a far stretch to enter healthcare? Luckily for us, the hospital had about a two-year timeframe before opening, so we forged ahead. Surely enough, it wasn’t long before we went live with the first wholly IP-based engagement platform for hospitals in 2007 — Internet Protocol TV (IPTV was relatively uncommon in the US, and absent in healthcare until that point). We’re now 100% focused on healthcare, and it’s a very cool place to be. We’ve moved so far beyond just streaming video delivery and now provide a whole platform that engages patients at the point of care throughout their healthcare journey. 

Of course the two industries are different — for example, schools don't operate 24/7/365, but hospitals do. We no longer had evenings, weekends, and summers to do big projects and upgrades. We had to learn fast how to provide constant uptime without negatively impacting end users, and have been able to do so with stellar customer satisfaction and retention. Hospitals also have much larger IT staff than schools, which has allowed us to spend more time and focus on software development and outcomes optimization, and less time on network design and configuration. Of course we still retain our systems and network engineering chops, so we jump at every opportunity to consult on that, design, and implement networks.

I definitely think our history as a systems integrator and our experience in education prepared us incredibly well for healthcare. The stakes are so high in teaching and in nursing. Teachers and nurses are some of the most patient, passionate, and selfless people in the world. And take it from someone who’s heard it all - they definitely have the best stories.