“I see the value of telehealth, but I don’t know where to begin,” is a common statement in the world of digital health. It was no different when SCTRC and UAMS Institute for Digital Health & Innovation (IDHI) staff members met to train representatives from Chicot Memorial Hospital and Lake Village Clinic at the SCTRC Telehealth Training center located within the Arkansas Rural Health Partnership (ARHP) facility in Lake Village. Down here, residents don’t order prescriptions from Amazon or any other place on the internet. They go to their local pharmacy or have it delivered from the pharmacy. Many of clinic’s patients are within a six-block radius of their facilities. It’s not unusual for a patient to show up for an appointment with a new piece of health technology, like a smartwatch, that was given to them by their insurance, but the patient has no idea how to use it.
And this is rural America. This is a sampling of life in the Delta. Technology is rapidly becoming available, but providers and patients aren’t sure what to do with it. “It’s valuable, but how do we use it?”, asked one attendee. Some of the biggest obstacles discussed were billing, provider adoption, and internet access. We talked about the success of the UAMS Stroke Program and it improving a patient’s access to tPA during the appropriate time window facilitated through telehealth. We talked about other telehealth and telemedicine positives, such as remote patient monitoring devices, post-op follow-up visits, limiting travel for both the patient and provider, etc.
At the end of the training, as a follow-up to their original question, the attendee asked, “So how do we get it going?” The first step is easy: Talk to your patients about it.
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