Telemedicine and telehealth have been coming of age for some time now but in Texas and Louisiana, they’re taking great strides.
The telemedicine program at F. Marie Hall Institute for Rural and Community Health recently received a four-year, $1,308,242 grant from the health resources and services administration to create the TexLa Telehealth Resource Center.
The institute is located at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center’s (TTUHSC).
The TexLa Telehealth Resource Center includes university telehealth programs at TTUHSC and the Louisiana State University Health Care Services Division.
The grant will allow the states to bring healthcare services to people living in rural or underserved areas, through the use of telemedicine and telehealth.
Studies have found that patients in rural areas greatly benefit from telemedicine, which gets healthcare to people who might not have illnesses taken care of until they’re at a critical point, thus reducing or eliminating the need or cost of hospital stays, when problems are not caught earlier.
The center will reach those who don’t live close enough to regularly visit a doctor through treatment that’s extended through technology, such as video conferencing, transmission of still images, remote monitoring of vital signs and nursing call centers, according to a TTUHSC news release.
You don’t have to go to the doctor. The doctor comes to you via remote technology.
“The field is to where now the ‘tele-’ will just come out of it and it will be, ‘This is how we practice medicine,’ ” Kim Dunn, MD, said. “I actually teach a course in telemedicine, and the barriers have always been the technology, which is no longer a barrier. Payment models for telemedicine have been the biggest (problem), and now it’s a solvable problem because patients and payers realize it’s more cost effective to do it (this way).”
One of the reasons the center came about is that Texas and Louisiana combined are bigger than 10 resource centers of multiple states and each has a large number of residents living in rural communities, or who are under-served in urban communities, who need healthcare.
In December the USDA provided 34 states with funds to pursue delivering healthcare and education to residents living in rural and underserved areas.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
