Display Technology

Queens, New York hospital offers personalized messaging on high-definition TVs

Image courtesy of LG Electronics USA Inc.

June 2, 2021

Patients at NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens in Jamaica, New York have received a personalized welcome message and easy, interactive access to information and services on their TV sets, according to a press release.

"What started as an upgrade of our TV service turned into much more," the hospital's interim CEO Dean Mihaltses said in the press release. "Now we can offer patients important education, too, and continually enhance their comfort and overall hospital experience through new technology."

The hospital has a network of about 250 high-definition smart TVs from LG Business Solutions USA integrated to communicate over the facility's existing coaxial cable infrastructure and running TigrPX patient-engagement software designed and implemented by healthcare TV solutions provider TeleHealth Services.

The NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens solution is built around the latest UL-hospital-listed LG 32-inch Pro:Centric health care TVs (model 32LT662M), designed to work with most pillow speakers, including with the hospital's new Curbell Medical models supplied by TeleHealth Services, and run TeleHealth's TigrPX system using their built-in LG webOS software.

NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens adopted 32-inch flat-panel HDTVs based on room dimensions to help patients clearly and comfortably see everything on-screen. The team at TeleHealth Services integrated RF distribution technology with all the TVs so they could receive not only entertainment channels from the new Spectrum TV cable head-end, but also the digital education and information content delivered through TigrPX over the hospital's network.

The new pillow speakers enable the patients to operate the LG hospital TVs and TigrPX system. TeleHealth Services programmed an intuitive, tiled home screen giving users access to TV content, hospital information (such as pharmacy hours, locations and more), a set of programmable preferences and a catalog of patient education.

The TigrPX system interfaces with the hospital's admission, discharge and transfer system to identify who is in each room, and they communicate back and forth with nurses' station computers so staff can assign appropriate content to each patient and monitor whether they watch it. When the system launched in October 2020, TeleHealth had built a library of about 250 education videos in English and Spanish, as well as with closed captions. Today, the content library has doubled.