By HFT Staff

Exterity announced that Overlake Medical Center, a 350-bed, non-profit regional hospital in Bellevue, Washington, has installed a VITEC internet protocol TV (IPTV) system. Designed to improve the patient experience and manage the hospital’s in-house video requirements, the new system is part of Project FutureCare, an upgrade and refurbishment project in progress at the healthcare facility. With a budget of $250 million, the five-year project will help Overlake provide healthcare excellence in the region. 

The cornerstone of Project FutureCare is a new 240,000-square-foot tower that opened in February 2021. This new facility has a new concourse-style drop-off and improved wayfinding, while also offering larger, single-patient rooms that combine the space for family zones. 

During the design phase, Jeni Connelly, IT senior project manager at Overlake, and technology lead for the new building, says he realized a new IPTV system could act as a catalyst for improving patient experience at the medical center: 

“We evaluated our legacy video system – largely coaxial-based cable TV – and realized it didn’t support the in-room entertainment experience we wanted to offer our patients,” she says. “The New East Tower project gave us a chance to change that for the better. We decided to opt for a state-of-the-art IPTV system as we felt it would be the ideal solution to address our ‘patient experience’ quandary, as well as service the full array of our day-to-day video needs.” 

The IPTV system needed to consolidate 350 patient rooms – as well as common areas and a videowall in the entrance lobby – onto one network, which is centrally managed and supervised. The hospital also hoped to upgrade the existing cable TV system to include video-on-demand (VoD) services, while giving patients faster access to information and educational videos, as well as other internal content. 

Neurilink was chosen as the audio visual systems integrator for the project and started work in March 2020. The company worked with VITEC to design an IPTV system that would satisfy the varying demands of the hospital staff and patients. 

The system comprises a 4TB management server that hosts all applications and devices on the system, including VoD services and recordings, and in-house custom channels, including a patient education VoD library. Hollywood movies are also available for patient entertainment, with Pro:Idiom encrypted videos streamed directly to healthcare-grade smart TVs. The system also incorporates ATSC and QAM gateways to capture cable TV and over-the-air (OTA) channels to complement VoD and use, when required, the hospital’s existing radio frequency system. An AvediaStream m9605 Media Player also powers the video wall in the lobby and provides the ability to display 4K video and detailed graphics  up to 4K and 60fps. 

Each new patient room contains a hospital-grade display complete with an intuitive user interface custom-designed by the team. For convenience, the menu is navigated with the nurse call pillow-speaker remote so the patient only needs one device to be in full control. 

The VITEC IPTV system has helped Overlake provide patients and staff with managed access to different categories of content– whether VoD, in-house videos, proprietary programming or OTA broadcasts – via a streamlined system. The hospital has improved the patient experience and delivers increased value for all of its stakeholders.