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Dec. 2007 - SRMH contracts CareNetTV.com, Inc. to provide digital signage...
CarenetTV.Com, Inc. attends the 2008 Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas
CareNetTV becomes a certified reseller of Planar’s CoolSign 4.0 networked digital signage software.
Santa Rosa, CA, Thursday, February 28, 2008: CareNetTV.com, Inc., a northern California company dedicated to creating evidence-based patient/family education content for hospitals and urgent care centers, recently attended the Digital Signage Expo, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, where CEO Robert Sampson, RN, and Vice President John Rives announced their decision to partner with Planar Systems, Inc. When Robert was asked why CareNetTV chose to be a certified reseller of Planar products in the delivery of their clinically specific healthcare-related content and digital signage services, he replied, “When we decided to offer our patient and family education guides for the Emergency Department and Intensive Care Units on networked digital signage, we established a comprehensive range of technical criteria and service standards that only a few companies could meet. Many months of surveys, meetings, demonstrations, testing, and analysis have culminated in our enthusiastic decision to partner with Planar. After attending the Digital Signage Expo, we couldn’t be more confidant that we made the right choice! Our entire family of healthcare-related services and education products are designed, reviewed, and produced specifically for hospitals by professional healthcare providers. Our clients serve a diverse patient and visitor population. They require and deserve the very best our industry has to offer and we intend to deliver it. That’s our mission and our commitment.”
When John Rives first contacted Marie Fowler, Planar’s Western Regional Manager of Signage Sales, he was very impressed by her level of customer service. “Customer service is essential to us and our extremely busy clientele.” John added that “another advantage of using Planar’s CoolSign 4.0 software is that we can integrate our own Adobe Flash™ templates into CoolSign, which wasn’t possible with most of the other companies’ software. This will allow us to simplify the process of updating content for the hospital administration and staff. We are essentially the interface between the hospital and the digital signage software, and we offer a complete line of useful branded templates for each facility. Other companies have tried introducing digital signage in hospitals and failed because they left it up to the hospital administration or staff to create the content. We take care of content creation and scheduling, leaving the administrator free to handle other tasks.”
CareNetTV evolved from the real need for better patient information and education in hospitals and urgent care centers. Robert Sampson, CEO of CareNetTV, developed one of the core programs, the ED STAT GUIDE, over a period of years while working as a registered nurse specializing in emergency services and critical care. With each generation, this bilingual product has evolved to dynamically educate patients and visitors, improve employee work-flow, mitigate risk and liability, reinforce patient safety, and support institutional identity and branding. With the recent explosion of affordable digital signage hardware and software, Mr. Sampson teamed up with John Rives, owner of DiscWrite CD Promotions, a multimedia development company in northern California, to create a complete line of patient and family education presentations and services. Together they formed CareNetTV, which – along with producing patient education videos and presentations – now offers a full line of customizable, branded digital signage templates for hospitals. These templates have a simple web-based user interface that allows administrators or staff to easily update the content on all hospital signage from their computers.
CareNetTV offers a variety of evidence-based content for hospitals on a subscription basis. Their value-package pricing for stand-alone and networked digital signage simplifies an often complex buying decision. Each package includes everything clients need to make a decision about deploying DSN in their institutions. John Rives, who also manages product development for CareNetTV, noted that “we develop the majority of our content using Adobe Flash™, which offers higher-resolution text and graphics than the standard mpeg or avi video used by most other content producers. Flash™ has the added advantage of small file sizes (about ten percent of typical video files) that free up player memory and protect processors from overheating and failure due to the large system resource requirements of video.”
During the Digital Signage EXPO 2008, CareNetTV.com also announced their reseller agreement with TTUFF Technologies, a Canadian company specializing in the supply of Small Form Factor Digital Signage Drive Systems. “Just as we searched for superior digital signage software,” explained Robert Sampson, ”we also established strict specifications for players that were reliable, cost-effective, and easy to mount on our displays. We were pleased to discover Doug Wismer, VP of Sales & Marketing for TTUFF Technologies, and Kristen Robinson, Sales Representative. Their technical expertise and customer service are top-notch. They are helpful and easy to work with.” TTUFF products have quickly gained a reputation for performance and reliability in highly demanding commercial environments. By placing drive systems on the back of each display, signal quality is improved, installation costs are lowered, and the total display system capability and flexibility are significantly enhanced. “We were so impressed with the quality and temperature ranges of TTUFF players in our stand-alone installations,” said John Rives, “that we asked Planar engineers to certify them for our networked use with CoolSign 4.0 Software and Planar displays.”
