IT was a regular meeting of the south east regional health authority - many of the same people and a lot of the same issues - but the setting was strikingly different.
Instead of personnel from each of the branch offices journeying to Kingston to sit around a conference table, members participated right from their home offices.

The meeting was made possible by videoconferencing, a technology that has been talked about in Jamaica for a few years now, but one for which the broader range of applications is only just being discovered.

Teleconferencing, or videoconferencing technology, allows video images to be transmitted among various parties at multiple sites, even if they are geographically separated.

Originally done using analogue video and satellite links, today videoconferencing uses compressed digital images transmitted over wide area networks (WANs) or the Internet.

"We were able to conduct our meetings in real time, with absolute clarity in terms of sound and visuals, and most of all, at considerable savings in terms of transportation and logistics," said one of the authority's representatives, Alan Soon.

Similarly, Richard Byles, president of Life of Jamaica/Sagicor, immediately recognised the system's potential after participating in a demonstration.

"Why pay to send a man to Barbados for a meeting," he reasons, "when he'll be doing two or three days of travelling just to do three hours of business?"

Those instances come as no surprise to Owen Burthwright, country manager of Pario Solutions - formerly the Lewis Group - the Jamaican company which offers the systems and facilitated the demo.

"What more organisations are realising is that in the face of today's globally competitive pressures, they need to have dynamic, flexible structures, with effective decision-making enabled by real-time collaborative communications," said Burthwright.

"Videoconferencing can help them achieve that and so it is now increasingly being viewed as a strategic business tool."
A business tool now worth billions of dollars worldwide, and one expected to continue growing significantly in the near term.

Technology research firm In-Stat's latest projection is that videoconferencing end points (or hardware) will value nearly US$875 million in 2007, and the services US$5.5 billion during 2007.

Based on the end-user experiences to date, Burthwright envisages more widespread deployment of videoconferencing systems and services, particularly in novel situations not previously known to make extensive use of technology.

"The Supreme Court of Jamaica utilised our systems and services to allow an individual based overseas to give evidence in a Jamaican trial," he said.
Videoconferencing is also being used to enhance the education system.

"We implemented a system at the UWI and we also facilitated a guest lecture from an overseas point," said the Pario executive.

"The medical faculty is interested in the possibility of using the system to provide access to critical expertise and also to facilitate procedural observations," he told Sunday Finance.
In short order, and as demand dictates, videoconferencing is becoming less of a stand-alone application, and more a "component" that can be bundled with, or "bolted onto" other widespread applications such as Voice-over-Internet (VOIP), unified messaging and web conferencing.

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