The Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation works to elevate the standard of healthcare provided in Macau and across China, helping medical practitioners acquire advanced professional knowledge. As part of fulfilling this mission, the Foundation hosts symposiums on the newest techniques and technologies emerging across a range of medical practice specialties, bringing overseas best practices to local practitioners.

Seeking to make its symposiums available to those professionals who could not attend in person, as well as for those who did attend but would want to review the content again at a later time, the Foundation began recording each symposium and has been sharing them online since 2007.

At first, YouTube was the seemingly-obvious, zero-cost solution for hosting the Foundation’s medical symposium recordings. Over time, however, it became clear to the Foundation that sharing recordings of its symposiums would be an essential part of improving access to eLearning for the medical professional community in Greater China — and that providing more videos would require a better alternative to YouTube.

The challenge:

Finding A Better Alternative to YouTube for Sharing Instructional Video

By sharing its symposium recordings on YouTube, the Foundation was able to help provide medical professionals in Greater China with greater access to the latest best practices and cutting-edge research and expertise.

Yet while YouTube helped the Foundation prove the model could work — sharing its videos online did help more medical professionals access the information the Foundation was providing — YouTube itself soon became a limitation.

The Foundation wanted to know who had accessed its videos and wished to have viewer-level analytics that could identify which topics those viewers were interested in. YouTube simply doesn’t offer those features.

More importantly, while the depth of information presented during the Foundation’s symposiums is what makes each session valuable to attendees, it also makes it exceptionally difficult for viewers to quickly find specific details when watching the recordings later.

Without any means to search for content inside the video on YouTube, viewers could only click through the video timeline at random to attempt to find a specific topic or detail that was discussed. This weakness made video hosted on YouTube inefficient for learning.

The solution:

A Searchable Video Platform Designed for Instructional Content

Seeking to overcome YouTube’s limitations, the Foundation began looking for an alternative solution. Following a recommendation from a partner, the Foundation began examining Panopto, an end-to-end video platform designed for creating and sharing instructional content.

With Panopto, the Foundation would have more flexible options for sharing its symposium videos online. Videos could be shared publicly, or require viewers to log in. Additionally, Panopto included video analytics that would allow the Foundation to see who had watched which videos. This enabled the Foundation to know what topics local medical practitioners were most interested in.

Just as importantly, when it came to video search, Panopto had far more advanced capabilities than YouTube. Panopto’s Smart Search video search engine automatically indexes every word spoken and every word shown on-screen for every recording uploaded to the video library. With Smart Search, viewers could quickly find and fast-forward to any relevant moment in any recording, making the videos much more valuable as a learning resource.

The Foundation could also use Panopto’s recording and editing tools to improve the quality of its symposium videos. With YouTube, the Foundation could only present one video feed at a time. This limited the Foundation to recording the presenter standing in front of their slides projected on a screen — an imperfect solution that sometimes left slides virtually unreadable in the resulting video.

With Panopto, the Foundation could instead easily record multiple video streams simultaneously, making it possible to show both the presenters and the presentation in separate, synchronized video feeds. Presenters could even add additional video feeds in order to more clearly capture demonstrations or other visual materials as well, with Panopto’s multi-camera recording capabilities.

Watch one of the Foundation’s recorded seminars below:

 

The results:

A Video Learning Program That Helps to Improve Local Healthcare Practices

Adopting Panopto gave the Foundation the tools it needed to offer medical professionals in Macau and Greater China access to the newest ideas and technological advances in their fields, and ultimately, a more complete learning experience.

“The goal of the Foundation is to bring the newest medical knowledge to local practitioners,” said Michael Ching, Director of Operations at the Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation. “We believe Panopto is the video platform that can help us achieve that mission and enable us to help lift the standards of local healthcare practices.”

Now the Foundation uses Panopto to create professional-looking symposium recordings with a customized video player that features the organization’s own branding. And symposium attendees can now search for relevant topics within the Foundation’s video library and instantly begin playback at the exact relevant moment they needed to see.

From corporate communications to live streaming, today the Foundation continues to explore new uses for Panopto. It hopes to discover more ways that video can help it support the medical community in Greater China in the future.

 

Download the printable PDF version of this case study here.

 

 

About The Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation

Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation is a not-for-profit organization established in Macau in 2005.

The Foundation works to promote, develop, and finance socially beneficial, educational, academic, economical, charitable, cultural, recreational, athletic, scientific and technological research activities. The Foundation is especially committed to supporting those activities relating to improving the quality of medical service in Macau and other regions in China, including financing the training of medical practitioners in the techniques and technologies in their relevant areas of professional expertise.