The University's Health Systems Office of Telemedicine recently received a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture that will allow the program to expand in southwestern Virginia.
The $230,320 grant will expand the program, which now serves the counties of Lee, Buchanan, Wise and Russel, to Smyth and Dickenson counties, said Eugene Sullivan, director of the Office of Telemedicine.
The program now serves. With the grant, the program will be extended to serve
The Office of Telemedicine uses a "statewide ... program to provide clinical consultations and patient education," said Karen Rheuban, medical director of the Office of Telemedicine.
The service is meant to allow patients, after visiting their primary care providers in their area, to see a specialist in Charlottesville without making the trip -- instead, patients are diagnosed through the use of live audio or video interaction with physicians.
The service "costs the patient the same as if they had made the trip [to Charlottesville], but it saves on time and transportation costs," Sullivan said.
The program is able to service patients through two "modes of operation": Interactive telemedicine workstations and store and forward workstations.
The interactive telemedicine workstation is "a clinical session where both the patient and their primary care giver are present and we exchange data between the two sites, such as a patient's heartbeat and high resolution images" in order to make a medical diagnosis, Sullivan said.
The store and forward workstations allow for a doctor "to take a picture and give a description of the patient, and put it in an electronic mail folder and a doctor [here in Charlottesville] will look at it and render a medical decision and give a recommendation," he said.
The Office of Telemedicine already has given about 1,500 live interactive consultations in this way, Rheuban said.
"We really get to reach out and touch our patients," she said.
"We are very excited about the program. U.Va. always has had an outreach program and this allows us to be there more frequently," Sullivan said.
The Office of Telemedicine also is looking to "start more educational programs at Wise because the [telemedicine] center there is only about three miles from the [University's] campus at Wise," he said.
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