A long time ago…

…when cell phones came in bags, OS/2 and AS400s were mainstream, Cisco had just become a public company and Mark Zuckerberg was in Grade School; an Italian software house developed a revolutionary technology to transmit data over satellite.

Satellite was (and still is) a hard environment to work with because you need to be able to deal with high latency, and high variability in signal strength and network stability.  Our development team conquered this challenge and beamed newspapers from Italy to the Olympic Village for the 1996 Games in Atlanta so athletes could read the daily news as it happened back home.

This technical achievement was commercialized into a video communication platform, an enterprise client-server program used by commercial clients to video call from their desktop computers (Windows XP by now!) to colleagues on three continents.

Over time, the mixture of enterprise class reliability and video quality, with strong encryption and a lightweight software client was adopted by banks, insurance companies and health care operators.  Then we noticed a funny thing.  As patient data security became more critical in health care, the number of health care clients selecting our software platform was going up steadily.  But they wanted more.

Healthcare technology professionals could see they had a problem brewing, with multiple disparate systems making it harder and harder for staff to train, learn and operate all the technology equipment.  So we decided to try to make things easier.  We focused on the healthcare market and dug in to the systems: existing video communications, user management, EMR/EHR, PACS/Image management, and others.  We started to build bridges.

The nice thing about being a software company is that if you work hard enough you can make any software package talk to any other software package if someone wants them to.

And our clients wanted a lot.  Growing to thousands of severs operating on four continents (We are working on the Australians, we’ll get them eventually), swyMed has become a short-list selection for health systems interested in telehealth, and the first-look selection for mobile telehealth.  Our software is a key component on the first mobile telestroke unit deployed in the US at the University of Texas-Houston.  It connects providers to patients in behavioral health centers, school nurses to local medical centers, powers ambulances for remote trauma triage, and a host of provider to provider applications.

Along the way, we’ve been recognized for innovation, and developed some excellent relationships, and have made a difference in the lives of people around the world.  And there is more to come.