The Center for Rural Health Innovation and County Cablevision invited AMD Global Telemedicine to participate in a program to educate public officials, healthcare practitioners, and local citizens on the benefits of telemedicine to use in Mitchell and Yancey Counties in Western North Carolina. The Western part of the state is faced with a persistent shortage of qualified health professionals and higher rates of morbidity and mortality for preventable diseases.
AMD Global Telemedicine taking part in the demonstration showed how use of their software technology along with specialized medical devices can be used to deliver clinical exams on patients in rural homes.
The Center for Rural Health runs the My Health-e-Schools Telemedicine Program and collaborates with primary care physicians via telemedicine to provide many services, including common acute issues. This is accomplished using high definition video conferencing plus specially equipped stethoscopes and cameras to enable centrally located healthcare providers to examine students at multiple schools.
“This demonstration is a way for us to see how the combination of cutting edge technology and our community’s new broadband service can make a profound impact on the health of our community”, said Dr. Steve North Medical Director and Founder for the Center for Rural Health Innovation.
The Center is also a member of the North Carolina Multisite Adolescent Research Consortium for Health which is a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill based program that Dr. North co-directs.
The research group uses a network of school-based health centers and adolescent health practices to study effective methods for improving adolescent health and life-long health trajectories. In another project, established by MY Health-e-Schools, Brad Friedman MD, certified in pediatric cardiology, is providing preventive cardiology services using telemedicine between Mission Children’s Hospital and the Mission Center for Telehealth in the Ashville North Carolina area.
Alaska is another state with remote rural areas benefiting from the use of telecommunications technology in the schools. Through the USDA Distance learning and Telemedicine Program (DLT), funding for $500,000 was recently awarded to purchase video conference equipment to help eleven schools in three rural school districts in Southwest Alaska as these rural schools are isolated and can only be reached by water or planes.
Now three schools utilizing technology in this rural area are going to be connected to the University of Alaska Southeast as the university will be offering a wide range of vocationally oriented and high interest curricula to help the students.
Another school district in Alaska, the Annette Island School District received $394,665 to acquire interactive video conferencing to develop a distance learning system to connect 921 students living in a remote rural locations by using a video teleconferencing platform to help the students and the school communicate with the world-at-large via the internet.