This is the fourth article in series highlighting technology innovations that are transforming healthcare. Read the third article on consumer wearables.

Telemedicine leverages modern communications technologies to enable physicians to conduct examinations from a distance, bringing the expertise of trained personnel and specialists to patients to locations beyond their physical location. Telesurgery is an exciting category of telemedicine that enables surgeons to leverage state-of-the-art robotics and HD video technology to perform remote surgical procedures. It brings surgical expertise to remote areas and underserved populations and helps healthcare providers improve surgical outcomes, reduce costs, and make better use of expert surgeons.

Telesurgery delivers a wide range of advantages that benefit not just individual patients, but the population as a whole. In addition to bringing expert surgeons to remote areas and rural populations without requiring the time and expense of travel, it makes better use of specialists when and where they are needed most. It also helps to extend knowledge by enabling local surgeons to observe and learn.

Of course, to support these sophisticated technologies, hospitals need to ensure that their networks have the capacity and performance to deliver premium-quality HD video streams; this requires a high-bandwidth, low-latency service, such as Ethernet.

Tomorrow: patient portals