NRTRC Telemedicine Conference 2014

For more information on the conference go to our conference website by clicking here.
Northwest Regional Telehealth Resource Center

For more than a decade, telemedicine services have been available to Montana patients and providers thanks to a growing network of fiber-optic lines, IP addresses and, perhaps most essentially, increased trust and enthusiasm in a system that turns traditional health care on its head.
A bill passed in the last legislative session that requires private insurance companies to cover telemedicine services may increase the number of people using telemedicine and expand its services, the bill’s supporters say.
Senate Bill 270, sponsored by Sen. Edward Buttrey, R-Great Falls, was signed into law in April.
Medicare and Medicaid had been covering the service, and Indian Health Services and the VA offer telemedicine services to its patients as well.
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The University of Washington is conducting a telehealth study addressing the impact of UW TelePain Case Conferences on pain management in rural and underserved communities and is seeking participants for the study. The purpose of the study is to examine provider-level and patient-level outcomes of a telehealth-enhanced symptom management intervention. For more information on what is required and who to contact please refer to the the study announcement by clicking here.
The school in the remote town of Assin Foso, Ghana, might be the last place you’d expect to find a videoconferencing system—for one, there’s no broadband service—but there it is. The story of how it got there is worth reading for any technology manager faced with projects such as setting up a videoconferencing system on short notice because a science teacher landed a virtual interview with an astronaut.
In late 2011, The Hershey Company began work on a distance-learning project to connect the Assin Foso school with students in Hershey, PA. The company asked its videoconferencing vendor, Cisco, to help facilitate the virtual classrooms at both ends.
In Ghana, the challenges included:
To read the full article click here.
Medical peripherals can combine with a smartphone to create the function of an ultrasound machine, an EKG reader, or an otoscope, to name just a few diagnostic devices. But without buying anything extra, nearly every consumer mobile device has a camera of some sort built-in. That means that when it comes to dermatology, most patients have, right in their pockets, the tools to gather much of the data their doctor needs to treat them.
Teledermatology was a major topic at the American Telemedicine Association conference in Austin, Texas, in particular the “store and forward” kind, which is teledermatology where patients take pictures and send them to their dermatologist, who sends a treatment plan back — rather than conducting the examination in realtime. Just as the country is experiencing a dermatologist shortage, sufficiently high quality cameras are becoming widespread enough to support remote skin care.
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As they move out of pilot initiatives and into implementations, telemedicine projects are taking a star role in pediatric care models across the country, a seemingly natural fit for extending the reach of scarce subspecialists beyond the four walls of their offices.
Telemedicine care works the same -- mostly -- for pediatric patients as it does for adults -- save for a slightly different approach to "looking into a little kid's ears" as opposed to a grown-up's, said Dr. Neil Herendeen, associate professor in the University of Rochester's department of pediatrics.
Herendeen is the medical director at Health-E-Access, a Rochester, N.Y.-based telemedicine program that provides videoconference doctor "visits" with children, who link directly from their schools or daycare centers. Using such examination tools as digital stethoscopes and high-definition cameras, physicians and nurse practitioners at Golisano Children's Hospital connect with on-site telemedicine assistants to diagnose and treat routine childhood illnesses, as well as to communicate their findings and recommendations.
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A special edition of the NRTRC's News & Views Newsletter has just been posted to our website. It is a wrap-up of our Telemedicine Conference we held in March and an announcement of next year's conference location.
Check it out by going to our newsletter page.
Since the late 90’s, out-of-state physicians are able to procure a telemedicine license from the State of Montana. However until recently there were no other laws on the books for telemedicine. That changed on April 5th when Governor Steve Bullock signed SB 270 into law. Montana is one of four states to sign new telemedicine legislation in the last month and is only the 2nd state in the Northwest region to pass a parity law (Oregon passed theirs in 2009). There are now nineteen states with telemedicine parity laws and ten other states reviewing proposed legislation.
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Officials at Massachusetts General Hospital announced Monday the launch of a new telehealth pilot aimed at bringing healthcare services to psychiatry and neurology patients statewide through real-time video visits.
The six-month pilot slated to go live this month will focus primarily on child/adolescent psychiatry, heart failure and neurology patients, officials say. The 907-bed hospital based in Boston will tap American Well for the telehealth technology platform.
The Web-based platform is designed to extend the ability of physicians to improve care from the patients' home or work using the Internet, smartphones or tablet devices.
To read the full article click here.
No longer languishing on the fringes of the industry, telemedicine is well on its way to becoming a fundamental component of mainstream healthcare delivery. According to the American Telemedicine Association (ATA), approximately 200 telemedicine networks have been established nationwide, and more than 50 percent of U.S. hospitals use at least one telemedicine service.
Subsidies from the public and private sector are beginning to make it financially feasible for rural hospitals and practices to deploy telemedicine technology. The legal and administrative barriers to adoption are also slowly faling. Seven states and the District of Columbia have introduced bills that address telemedicine converage and reimbursement. These recent developments are encouraging and strongly suggest that telemedicine is here to stay.
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Serving the medical community in eastern Washington since 1996, Northwest TeleHealth offers member sites a robust video conference network comprised of more than 160 units connecting healthcare facilities across eastern Washington. Northwest TeleHealth provides a collaborative environment for administrative, educational, and clinical activities to improve access to services, care coordination and health education to benefit patients and providers within our region. Clinical services include patient consults for wound care, behavioral health, diabetes, cardiology, and physical therapy. By bridging the distance for better patient care, and providing a cost effective and convenient model for healthcare delivery, Northwest TeleHealth is a mutually beneficial system to all who access its programs and services.
Website: www.nwtelehealth.org
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