RoboDocs on Call
From: AARP Bulletin - 03/2007 - page 10

Instead of wasting precious time transferring a stroke patient to a
specialized treatment center, some hospitals are turning to robots for
on-the-spot care. The RP-7, a 5-foot robot with a screen for the head, is now
in 21 Michigan hospitals, allowing stroke specialists to communicate with
local doctors and provide immediate, round-the-clock care to hospital
patients from miles away. The stroke specialist uses a laptop to operate the
robot and remotely examines the patient, downloads scans, checks medication
charts, and even walks the local physician through administering a
clot-busting drug. "It works to everybody's advantage," says Michael Chan,
spokesman for InTouch Technologies of Santa Barbara, CA, maker of the RP-7.
"The local hospital keeps 90 percent of its patients, the expert bills for
his services, and a phenomenal amount of money is saved by preventing
disability from stroke."  

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Robots Roll in an Aging Society

A tech startup based in Santa Barbara, CA has developed the RP-7 Remote
Presence Robotic System that allows professionals in the healthcare community
to consult with hospital-based patients and healthcare staff in a more rapid
and efficient manner, thus improving hospital through-put, physician
efficiency and providing high quality care. RP-7 is a wireless, mobile,
Remote Presence Robot developed by InTouch Health that lets doctors "be in
two places at once". Remote Presence is the ability to project yourself to
another location to move, see, hear and talk as though you were actually
there. This technology is currently utilized in hospitals across the nation
such as the Hackensack University Medical Center, the neurologic intensive
care unit at the UCLA Medical Center, the Detroit Medical Center, and Johns
Hopkins.  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.aarp.org/international/agingadvances/innovations/Articles/02_07_intl_robots.html#US

Links: InTouch Health - Virtually There Technology
http://intouchhealth.com/products-RP7.html

Robot Allows Kansas City Physicians to Utilize Remote Stethoscope
http://salesandmarketingnetwork.com/news_release.php?ID=2015102

InTouch Health enables world's first statewide stroke network using remote presence
http://www.beringea.com/press/2006/view/intouch.html

Michigan hospitals to have robot on call
http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/story.html?id=555c0cef-7dd6-44db-91ca-b61aa5619994&k=91832

Robots and physicians work together to increase the quality of care
http://www.methodistinternational.org/ebulletin/3/5.shtml