by  Carl W. Taylor, Assistant Dean and Director of the Center for Strategic Health Innovation, University of SouthAlabamaCollege of Medicine

There are estimates that more than 90 million Americans live with chronic illness and that 7 out of 10 deaths are caused by these conditions.  These conditions, while already difficult to treat, become even more so for rural hospitals without the resources necessary for diagnosing and treating them effectively.  Health Information Technology (HIT) presents one of the best hopes for addressing this problem in rural communities throughout the nation.

At the Center for Strategic Health Innovation at the University of South Alabama, we have been working to design a system that connects rural health care providers with resources beyond their hospitals and with the patient’s whole medical history, to help them better treat chronically ill individuals.  Through these tools, we can deliver knowledge and best practices of the whole medical community over the Internet to improve patient care.

Despite the fact that telemedicine has been around for years, its promises have not been truly realized. Fortunately now traditional telehealth strategies are being supplemented by emerging Health Information Technology tools. This new intersection of both patient-centered knowledge and the ability to deliver expanded resources promise to revolutionize the practice of medicine. 

The hindrance to large scale adoption has been broadband deployment.  Everyone agrees that this can be a revolutionary solution to treating the chronically ill, improving the skill level of doctors, and reducing medical costs.  However, without broadband Internet to connect rural hospitals to the same resources available to major urban medical centers, telemedicine will continue to creep along at slow intervals.

I have seen the effects of inadequate resources in rural areas of Alabama.  For instance, rural patients do not just have a chronic disease but often have multiple issues such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and depression. These combined, complex conditions stretch the limits of the rural physician. Yet the ability is there to aggregate best practices and to provide meaningful tools so that she or he can practice at a higher level of care. 

Along with my colleagues at South Alabama, we have developed RMEDE (Realtime Medical Electronic Data Exchange), a patient-centric health record system. RMEDE builds a record of care around a single patient as a whole so that the physician can in one view see all meds, all procedures, all diagnoses of the patient in one record. Beyond that, the physician can tap into the knowledge of other doctors via the Internet and see suggested steps to take to improve quality. RMEDE also links directly to the patient’s home via broadband connectivity so that the physiologic conditions of the patients are inputted into their record.  

Making this system available to rural hospitals through broadband Internet can increase quality of care, reduce costs, and improve the lives of patients.  Telemedicine, as the University of South Alabama redefines it, is the future of medicine and the savior of telemedicine is IP broadband deployment.