The use of picturephone service in a hospital

A Picturephone® two way visual communications system was operational from March 1973 to April 1976 at the Bethany-Garfield Hospital in Chicago, and achieved metered usage as high as 1800 calls per month. To assist the AT&T Marketing Department in its visual communications market exploration programme, interviews of Bethany-Garfield personnel who had access to the system were conducted. When asked to rate a number of individual features of the system, the high and medium users rated the fast access feature above all others. Thus the main reason for the high usage of the Picturephone system appears to have been less related to its visual communications feature than to its ‘hot-line’ capability to reach contacts quickly.