Providing technical assistance to healthcare organizations, networks, and providers is one of the prime directives of the Telehealth Resource Centers. Working with grantors, grantees, and grant writers to get funding into the hands of those that need or are looking to implement telehealth is a process that relies heavily on existing partnerships as well as building new ones.
The South Central Telehealth Resource Center (SCTRC) has a longstanding relationship with Rachel Ott, Grants Director for the Institute for Digital Health & Innovation (IDHI) at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “We usually start with people that we know and would trust us and to the extent possible, we try to make connections from those connections,” said Ott. “Often someone will say, ‘these people will be a great partner you should talk to them.’ We hopscotch from someone known to someone we don’t know yet, then we hopscotch to someone else.”
Ott has been working at what is now known as the IDHI, which began in 2004 as the ANGELS program. Since then, she’s been building her network of potential partners. This network continued to grow as more and more programs grew out of the ANGELS program, and in 2011, she received another network boost when the SCTRC grant was awarded to UAMS. Ott worked on the original SCTRC grant application and she’s confident that the partnerships across the region is what made the grant award possible.
“The neutrality of the SCTRC is very helpful,” said Ott. “As the telemedicine arm of UAMS, IDHI doesn’t want people to think we’re trying to sell UAMS services to their hospital. Programs such as the SCTRC and UAMS eLink give us a neutral ground to work with people. The fact is the SCTRC represents multiple states and has helped us build partnerships across those state lines.”
The SCTRC was able to bring in one of their partners, Dr. Susan Elswick, Associate Professor with the University of Memphis, on a more recent grant regarding COVID-19 funding through the FCC. Ott and others were working on building a consortium of over 30 rural clinics/hospitals for this proposal and the SCTRC was able to assist by bringing Dr. Elswick on board.
The SCTRC also helped connect the Arkansas State Office of Rural Health (SORH) and Ott on a grant starting March 1st of this year which provides outreach resources to charitable and rural health clinics interested in telemedicine (though Ott has a longstanding relationship with SORH and has worked with them continuously on rural health grants).
These are just a couple of examples of how the SCTRC has been able to connect people to funding and it often works as Rachel Ott described it: “hopscotch”. That is, sometimes people come to the SCTRC looking for funding, sometimes funding exists and applicants just need to find the right partners, and, sometimes, old partners are brought in and new partners are made as the grant proposal is being written.
Speaking of the SCTRC, Ott said, “They’ve been around for over a decade and in that time they’ve helped so many people learn about telehealth, learn how to improve their practice in telehealth, and they’ve done it all from a neutral, unbiased, non-sales approach .” “I’ve attended many national conferences and you end up getting sales pitches everywhere you go. When it comes to healthcare and making decisions for your business (for-profit or not), you need to be able to have an opinion and be able to interact with tools and interact with people who’ve used those tools without someone trying to sell you something. That’s what I like about the SCTRC. They come in and synthesize policies. They take complicated information and break it down to where everyone can understand it. They take complicated technologies and break them down where everyone can understand them. We just experienced this boon of telemedicine growth at the onset of the pandemic and the SCTRC was this federally-funded resource that provided advice and insight on a plane of neutrality that really no one else could.”
