Telehealth
Advanced Medicine for Rural America
Dateline: 06/20/99
A Real Problem
To city-dwellers, a painful, even life threatening three-hour ambulance ride to obtain
medical treatment is unthinkable. But, millions of isolated rural citizens must think
about it day in and day out. For these people, lack of ready access to excellent medical
care is a way of life and, far too often, death.
A Real Solution
Now, the brand new Office for the Advancement of
Telehealth (OAT), is working toward extending expert healthcare to rural America
through remote technologies like videoconferencing, the Internet, store-and-forward
imaging, streaming media, satellite and wireless communications.
The Department of Health and Human Services created OAT specifically "...to promote the wider adoption of effective telecommunications and information technologies in providing health care services to the nation’s underserved people."
The vision of the OAT Staff, as described in this 1997 article "Telemedicine: Building Rural Systems for Today and Tomorrow" is:
"A rural community where residents do not have to travel long distances to receive specialty care from urban centers of excellence; where all providers have access from computers in their offices to their patients' records, including all x-rays, lab tests, and video recordings of specialty consults; where rural residents have access to up-to-date health information and patients have access to their own medical record from home computers; where homebound rural patients can visit with their doctor or nurse by turning on the TV; where rural school nurses consult with adolescent health experts about students' medical conditions over the TV; and where health professions students at the local rural hospital and clinic are supervised daily over the TV by their teachers at a distant medical center." ("Telemedicine: Building Rural Systems for Today and Tomorrow" -- Dena S. Puskin, Sc.D., Carole L. Mintzer, M.P.A., and Cathy Wasem, R.N., M.N.)
("Telemedicine" is the use of telecommunications and information technology to provide clinical care at a distance.)
Services and projects of OAT, including Grant Administration, are coordinated by the Joint Working Group on Telemedicine (JWGT), a Federal interagency group represented by these 10 agencies:
- Appalachian Regional Commission
- Department of Agriculture
- Department of Commerce
- Department of Defense
- Department of Education
- Federal Communications Commission
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Department of Justice
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Department of Veterans Affairs
Some additional publications further explaining the promise of telemedicine and the role or OAT include:
- "OAT: Giving High-Tech Ideas the Human Touch" - Rural Health News, Spring 1999.
- Telemedicine Report to Congress - January 1997
- "Improving the Operational Definition of 'Rural Areas' for Federal Programs" - Federal Office of Rural Health Policy, 1993.
- More reports and publications not online
In Summary
If you've been looking for something that will make you proud of our Government and happy
about how your tax dollars are being spent, please take a look at The Office for the Advancement of Telehealth. See
if they don't do it for you.
