Case Study: From Doctors to Daters, Userplane's Instant Communicator Puts a Face on IM

Dr. Piraino believes that using Instant Messaging to communicate face to face is not only a more efficient way of communicating, but also one that helps improve professional relationships, boost group morale and cohesion, facilitate cooperation, and increase motivation.

"The real advantage of Instant Communicator is that you can actually see your colleagues and more fully interact with them," says Piraino. "They are not faceless, impersonal voices at the end of a phone line." In that sense, a visual communications tool like the Userplane Instant Communicator also gives its users a psychological advantage.

Radiologists can use Instant Communicator on regular PCs or they can call up the app (which runs within a standard Web browser) as a window within the larger screen of their radiology workstations, which house digital medical images such as X-rays. Thus the doctors can be sharing data images while simultaneously speaking to one another face to face via streamed IM video.

Piraino says that during the initial testing phase, IM is being used by only about 20 radiologists. About two-thirds of those are spread around the Clinic campus, while the other third are based in affiliated hospitals elsewhere in Ohio, as well as in Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania. Offsite users get access by logging into the clinic's intranet and giving their assigned password. Ordinarily, purchasers allow Userplane to also host the IM application, but in this case, due to security and privacy concerns, the clinic wanted to host it themselves. Userplane helped them install it on the hospital’s own Flash server attached to their clinic-wide intranet.

So of all the technologies available for building an IM system, why did Userplane choose Flash? Well, there are many reasons, says Mike Jones, but the biggest reason is that Flash—unlike other streaming technologies—will automatically detect Webcams and microphones. There's no configuring client PCs or downloading extra drivers or plug-ins. "It will dynamically detect things on the client side like processor speed and bandwidth, and it will adjust to the user," according to Jones. Although this sort of functionality could also be obtained by writing a custom Java applet, "there are issues about trying to do this on the Mac, and it is not something readily available for the Windows platform," says Jones.

Jones also says that Flash is "easier to get through firewalls, offers more advanced GUIs, and better overall integration." Also Flash is truly cross platform, working under RealPlayer as well as on Linux machines. Plus, there’s Flash’s ubiquity; Macromedia claims a 93% penetration rate. The bottom line on Macromedia Flash, according to Jones: "It's simply a better technology."

Because product simplicity is so important to his client base, Jones says his company has tried to make its tools "work like toasters." The Cleveland Clinic thinks Userplane has succeeded. "Instant Communicator is quite easy to use," says Piraino. "In fact, we chose it because we wanted as little software installation as possible and as few infrastructure changes and disruptions as possible."