Corporate Manager of Video Production at Baptist Health South Florida, Tony Vivian, and his team setting up in OR8 at South Miami Hospital.

If you’re familiar with popular hospital shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, then you’ve probably seen how young doctors and medical students learn on the field. The shows depict aspiring doctors viewing procedures behind glass walls while seasoned surgeons complete complicated surgeries. The students and surgeons at Baptist South Miami Hospital used a similar method until recently. However, since we teamed up with the hospital, we’ve made some serious modifications to the way they interact with young doctors and experts.

The New Surgical Training Suite

In the spring Baptist South Miami Hospital reached out to Midtown Video to task us with creating a link between a surgical training room and two 21st century operating rooms. The goal was for doctors performing surgeries to interact with and answer student’s questions – while they watched in a different room using monitors and audio equipment. The hospital also wanted to be able to video teleconference with other doctors in remote locations outside the hospital.

What we did was design a very complex audio/video system that allowed two-way communication from the operating room, classroom and “mock” operating room. All three rooms are now able to view and listen to each other thanks to multiple cameras and monitors installed. This is exceptional because students watching in the classroom can ask questions while they watch a live surgery in the operating room AND students in the “mock” operating room can also ask questions while they simulate surgeries during training.

Everyone is learning because everyone is able to communicate in real time, and that’s a beautiful thing.

The project took months to complete, but we love providing solutions to challenging projects! Our team worked nights and weekends, around scheduled surgeries and even worked around the medical tech team’s busy schedules  – all while meeting antiseptic requirements.

The completion of this project changes the face of medicine. Doctors can now videoconference and collaborate from different hemispheres and students have more access to their educators.

Here’s some of the equipment used to complete this project:

  • Sharp AQUOS monitors
  • Crestron Control systems
  • Polycom conferencing equipment
  • Chief mounts

Midtown Video delivered a system to allow multi-camera HD production to orginate in the operating room, including cameras, microphones, intercom and IFB.

All signals are routed over fiber and controlled from the surgical viewing area, including a Vizrt Tricaster 860, Mackie audio mixer, and our Crestron integration system.

The Crestron system allows for two kinds of special interfaces: displaying the Tricaster feed on monitors in the operating room by interfacing a Karl Storz medical imaging system, and sharing the Tricaster feed to remote parties with a Cisco videoconferencing codec.