Background
Virtual care video appointments (telehealth) provide an opportunity to remotely delivery
health care, where deemed appropriate, which can improve health outcomes and service
delivery while reducing the demand for travel.
Virtual care platforms may also be used to facilitate non-clinical remote meetings, such as for
education, medical training, and testing purposes.
The Yukon Telehealth Network (YTN) was first introduced in 2007, and was/is administered
by the Community Nursing Branch of the Yukon Government, in partnership with the Yukon
Hospital Corporation.
The original YTN infrastructure enabled health care providers to connect with their patients
from a physical telehealth workstation, which includes a monitor, camera, microphone,
speakers, and dedicated data line to encrypt the virtual sessions and ensure the quality of the
connection.
In 2017, the Yukon Government requested a full infrastructure upgrade of the solutions,
which led to an upgrade to the Cisco 1200 on-premises servers, which are owned, located
within the infrastructure of, and managed by the Yukon Government. This upgrade was fully
implemented in November 2020.
As a result of the 2020 upgrades, non-telehealth-workstation connections could be
established through the Yukon Government’s on-premise server. The YTN was more
commonly used by Yukon health care providers after this point; as the connection could be
established from their clinic or office and only required access to an appropriate office space,
an audio and video capable device, and an internet connection.
Connections between Yukon patients and their Yukon health care providers have continued
to increase since and are projected to increase further in 2025 (e.g., there have been over
200 in territory connections in the first two months of the year alone).
As part of the continued expansion of the YTN, the Yukon Government ICT has
recommended that Community Nursing transition the YTN to the Cisco hybrid model.
The hybrid model includes the Cisco Webex Video Mesh, which dynamically assesses
whether to use on-premise or cloud conferencing resources to better support increased
demand in YTN use. When on-premise resources are exhausted, telehealth connects to the
cloud conferencing resources to ensure continued capacity, available and quality of YTN
services.
