Health Tech Today show premiere, powered by Windows Live Messenger (original) (raw)

Today marks the premiere of a new program named Health Tech Today, which features informative interviews with some of the world’s top health leaders; compelling health-related personal stories; and the latest new technology and IT innovations. The show is hosted by Dr. Bill Crounse and the premiere episode features an interview with eHealth adovcate, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Here is the complete list of guests from the first episode.

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu – eHealth & human rights advocate, South Africa
• Dr. Kim Pittenger – MD, Medical Director, Virginia Mason, Kirkland, WA
• Don Detmer – MD, MA, Professor of Medical Education, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
• Andrew Cull – CEO, Remote Medical International
• Cornelia Ruland – PhD, Center for Shared Decision Making & Nursing Research, Oslo, Norway
• Chris Otto – CEO & Founder, Halo Monitoring

So what does this have to do with Messenger and why are we writing about it on the MessengerSays blog?

Besides being a great show on a topic that many of us feel passionate about, we’re happy to say that Windows Live Messenger was used to conduct all of the remote video interviews. A few weeks prior to the recording of the first episode we were approached by the producers asking if we thought the Messenger video call functionality would work for the live interviews they wanted to conduct with guests from all around the world. We said ‘of course’ and after a quick discussion it was clear that Messenger would indeed meet all their needs.

The producers explained to us that they would typically have to transport the guests to a studio and pay a hefty fee to setup a live satellite-link. They were very excited at how simple it was to setup a video call and not only did they save money (free!), but the guests didn’t even have to leave their homes to do the interviews.

This was a great win-win situation for everyone (except maybe the satellite-link owners) and the team is looking forward to hearing about more instances where our technology was used to bring things like this together.

Check out the episode for yourself at http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/healthtechtoday

Try a video call yourself!

Thanks,
Tolga & Lonn
Windows Live Messenger Team