In 2019, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) established its seventh institute: the Institute for Digital Health & Innovation (IDHI). In wanting to broadcast to the university who and what the institute’s mission and objectives are, the IDHI partnered with the South Central Telehealth Resource Center (SCTRC) to help create and coordinate an ongoing speaker series, the Quarterly Digital Health Series. The intended audience for these events was internal to the university, so it was only natural for the IDHI and the SCTRC to team up with the Translational Research Institute (TRI) to help fund and find speakers as well as tap into their larger distribution network. The events were hybrid -virtual and in-person events, but the series was put on hold at the onset of the pandemic. Topics covered – “Digital health: What’s now, new and next,” “Why the need for research in health care technology,” and “Remote patient monitoring: A Mississippi story.”
Sometime later, with all the thought provoking research projects out there and ongoing work through the pandemic, the TRI wanted to host a telehealth research series. They reached out to the IDHI and the SCTRC and together created a new event series, Going Digital: Innovations to Enhance Research. Over a period of three weeks in the fall of 2021, the events covered “All the basics: Digital health research,” “Mobile applications: Real-world examples,” and “Digital Tools and Wearables: Real-world examples.”
Now, with the establishment of the Rural Telehealth Evaluation Center and with the ongoing exciting work being done at the IDHI and TRI, efforts are currently underway (with the SCTRC at the helm) to create a new quarterly series as an amalgamation of the previous events. Currently, the SCTRC is recruiting speakers and planning dates with TRI. We’re looking to go live late Spring 2022 and some of the topics we’re hoping to cover at the onset include evaluations of the relationship between telehealth service delivery and U.S. hospital financial performance, especially in rural hospitals. The overall goal of the proposed evaluation is to examine associations between adoption of telehealth and measures of hospital financial performance, using operating margin and patient revenue per discharge.
