Technology Bringing More Med Students to Underserved Small Towns

There’s a new way of making doctors and a small town in Kansas is leading the way.

Because so many people in the state – and these include the poor, the elderly, and the uninsured – have to travel up to four hours just to see a doctor, the University of Kansas has opened a new medical school expressly devoted to the practice of medicine in small communities, with the hope that these new doctors will return to some of these rural areas when they open their own offices, according to a story by A. G. Sulzberger at nytimes.com.

And how will these students learn? Many courses, like anatomy, will be delivered over the Internet using streaming video, according to the story, so the students can take the classes wherever they are, whenever they want. Right now, there are only eight. Students, that is.

The story reports that over 50 percent of the primary care physicians in Kansas are “concentrated in the four largest counties,” leaving “a vast majority of the state “medically underserved.” People also need more care because they typically don’t see a doctor often, so health problems are exacerbated.

Some of the drawbacks of practicing in a small community are obvious: because of the severe shortage of doctors, and therefore, lack of back-up, medical professionals are on call 24/7, according to Sulzberger’s story. People who are used to living in big cities may find rural areas just too dull and confining. And, of course, as the story points out, salaries are smaller.

Christopher Wenner knew what he wanted when he opened his medical practice in a small town in Minnesota. One of a handful of physicians around the country to follow the new “Ideal Medical Practice,” a nonprofit movement to make primary care physicians more accessible through technology, he sees ten patients a day and spends at least 30 minutes to an hour with each of them, according to a story by Melissa Burlaga at Northland’s News Center.

A patient commented in the story that she loves being able to stay in contact with Wenner pretty much whenever she wants, thanks to technology. "I have e-mailed him six times and of the six times I have e-mailed him, he has e-mailed me back. And where do you find a doctor like that?"

Health care access has become a huge problem all over the country, according to a story by Chris Woolston at aarp.org/health, who writes that the 77 million Americans who live in rural areas have just 10 percent of the country’s doctors. He adds in his story that the ability to match the right patients with the right medicines becomes ever more complicated the farther you are away from “the medical hubs of big cities.”

 He reports that a 2008 study in the journal PLoS Medicine “found that life expectancies are actually declining in large swaths of rural America, a trend largely fueled by upswings in diabetes, cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.” And certainly not helped by a lack of doctors!

But technology is helping to close the gap, with teleheath, telemedicine and other waus of remote communication between doctors and their patients.