Try Acrobat Connect for Healthcare Collaboration

Adobe recently announced the release of its Acrobat 8 product line. Acrobat (and the associated PDF format) is in heavy use within the healthcare industry because of it’s ability to manage paper documents in electronic format with high fidelity.

One of the important new features of Acrobat 8 is Acrobat Connect which allows users to start a Web conference to collaborate on any kind of document (not just PDFs).

What’s great about Acrobat Connect (which I’ve used recently) is that it has the ability to easily collaborate on medical records, diagnosis charts, simultaneously view lab reports, etc. While not designed for the healthcare industry specifically, there are many features that good healthcare architects, technologists, and CIOs can specially put to use that would improve the ability to even legacy applications to be made collaborative.

Other tools, like GotoMeeting and WebEx, can do similar things but they can’t be installed in your environment behind a firewall (they are only externally hosted solutions) but Acrobat Connect can be made more secure and installed privately. It’s worth taking a closer look.

By the way, have you voted for your favorite healthcare informatics/technology blog yet?