Pexip powers video surgical training in Spain
Challenges
One of the hospital’s key goals is to deliver professional development, qualification and skills training for in-house and third-party staff. Every year they train more than 1,800 professionals locally, but they also need to teach external healthcare practitioners.
The hospital is renowned for its General and Gastrointestinal Surgery Unit, specializing in colorectal, oesophageal gastric, bariatric, hepatobiliary and pancreatic, endocrine, abdominal wall, breast disease and other kinds of surgery.
In partnership with the Spanish Association of Surgeons (AEC), an Oesophageal Gastric Surgery Course was scheduled (in 2022) for fourth and fifth year residents from all over Spain. The intention was to provide onsite training combined with e-learning.
To ensure that the distance learning was user-friendly, the e-learning solution needed to handle images generated in the operating theatre or from the hospital system. These types of images could include medical instrumentation, overhead and lamp cameras, vital signs, diagnostic tests, and more. All the images needed to be clearly viewed on local screens and easily shared with others so that the participants could actively collaborate during the surgical procedure.
Solution
To create the required e-learning solution, the hospital decided to use Azinsol’s operating theatre integration solution, called “MVM Operating Room Video Manager”, to capture, distribute and manage images produced in the operating theatre. This solution also offers a live collaboration module, enabling interaction between users by combining video, audio, images and relevant contextual information, coupled with add-ons, such as a laser pointer or freehand annotations on the visual field.
The MVM solution was also integrated with the Pexip Infinity videoconferencing platform, equipped with Pexip’s Virtual Meeting Rooms (VMR) and ‘managed node’ hosting on its own servers. This ensures the security and privacy of the meeting along with superior image, video and audio quality. The Pexip Infinity platform makes it possible to generate customized VMRs for each event. This allows the ‘teacher’ to connect to a secure website and use interactive tools on the images that are broadcast from the operating theatre.
The Pexip Infinity video communications platform has recently passed the National Cryptology Centre (CCN) audit and gained LINCE security certification under the CCN’s security reference framework. Critical videoconferences, such as healthcare content supported by the Azinsol + Pexip solution, comply with hospital information systems’ security and integrity requirements.
Results
The solution rolled out in Hospital Universitario Torrecárdenas’s general and gastrointestinal surgery operating theatres allows interactive pre and postgraduate distance teaching while also enabling video collaboration to support a remote surgery intervention.
“The Azinsol + Pexip solution is a simple and effective tool for routine operating theatre procedures, including distributing medical sources, streaming, recording and mentoring,” said Mª Esther González Revuelta, Director of IT and Information Systems, Hospital Universitario Torrecárdenas. “Pexip’s certifications earned from the National Cryptology Centre and its high availability ensure the security, reliability and confidentiality of the solution which is essential for the healthcare sector,” she added.
Hospital Universitario Torrecárdenas is already planning to expand this initiative, building more interactive e-learning courses and trainings based on its areas of expertise.
“In the immediate future we are planning to expand our work as a referral hospital by doing more training and video consultation with other hospitals, offering training in basic surgical techniques for primary care centres, doing more interactive training with medical and nursing students, and engaging in video collaboration with professionals at other Andalusian Health Service facilities and
also nationwide,” says Dr Ángel Reina Duarte, Head of the General and Gastrointestinal Surgery Department, Hospital Universitario Torrecárdenas.
.jpg?width=500&name=blog%20purple%20(1).jpg)