SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — The USDA is offering funding opportunities for distance learning and telemedicine projects. The monies provide increased access to education, training and health care resources in rural areas.
Springfield’s Southern Illinois School of Medicine has telemedicine projects in place and hopes to seek additional funding to expand.
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack announced its Rural Utilities Service, a Rural Development agency, is making $19 million available for fiscal year 2015. The Distance Learning and Telemedicine (DLT) program finances telecommunications equipment, computer networks and advanced technologies for use by students, teachers, medical professionals and rural residents.
Minimum grant amounts are $50,000; maximum amounts are $500,000 for FY2015.
Nina M. Antoniotti, RN, MBA, Ph.D. and executive director for Telehealth and Clinical Outreach at SIU, said, "The USDA grant has been around for probably about 20 years and its intent is funding technology support for distance learning telecommunications, internet and telemedicine. Early in the 1990s telemedicine programs were put in place through the USDA grants."
The funding has been important for areas in rural Illinois, and she said grants such as DLT would be helpful to fund telemedicine sites SIU HealthCare is planning. While the funding is vital to help telemedicine programs build infrastructure and purchase technology, the grant is a competitive and complicated application process. It requires matching funds at 50 percent and is designed for a geographic area that must meet the rural requirements of the grant.
Antoniotti added, "This is a very good grant … the whole purpose is reaching the rural underserved areas. The SIU Telehealth program will be working with central and southern Illinois."
The distance learning also serves to bring a primary care doctor to areas without one. "Some patients can get care over the phone; it is very similar to a video," she explained.
One physician working in SIU’s Telehealth program is Dr. Jeffery Bennett, the division chief of Adult Psychiatry and assistant professor of Clinical Psychiatry. He explained the Telehealth Networks and Programs component of SIU Medicine has recently been incorporated into SIU HealthCare.
"As the issues of reimbursement, security, HIPAA (patient privacy) compatibility and health delivery expansion have become more sophisticated, the ability of originating sites in more rural regions of southern and central Illinois have evolved to make better use of such services," he said.
"These services have included formal didactic presentations to state facilities or conferencing on various specific topics such as health care in developmental disabilities, grand rounds presentations from various clinical departments and other topics, but also more interactive case presentations from outside ambulatory or residential facilities and hospitals, followed by discussion to provide better-quality health care in the management of commonly seen clinical problems."
The Telehealth network works with family practitioners offering access for patient consultations in more than 17 specialties. "We have around 100 clinicians who requested to use Telehealth in their practice," Antoniotti said.
Patients go to their family doctor and through this, access the service of specialists right in their own doctor’s office. "This brings specialty health care closer to home," Antoniotti noted.
These specialty programs are broad, Bennett said. "Health care delivery through Telehealth systems (Telepsychiatry, Teleneurology, Teledermatology and Teleurology, as well as many other specialties) has evolved at SIU HealthCare as the delivery systems have advanced and as service needs have been identified. Telepsychiatry is often one of the first areas to develop, due to the paucity of psychiatric services generally and, more specifically, in rural regions of the state.
"The Department of Psychiatry … provides its residents and medical students with a training opportunity in an Adult Telepsychiatry Clinic, which provides consultative services to some of the Illinois critical access hospitals," he explained. "This USDA grant is an excellent offering since the need for better education and training among providers of health care in rural regions is actively challenged and growing in this time of national health care reorganization.
"Primary care providers are finding themselves the hub and center of the patient centered medical home model, in which they are expected to provide not only excellent primary care, but also to coordinate, manage and execute delivery of team-based care to whole populations in specialty areas.
"The educational and coordinative needs are many. Distance learning can help promote the growth of allied health care team members and increase the knowledge and scope of the primary care providers."
Since 2009, USDA has provided more than $182 million to expand access to learning at nearly 4,700 rural educational facilities and to improve delivery of medical care at more than 2,500 rural health facilities. Details of the DLT funding are on Page 29602 of the May 22 Federal Register. The application deadline is July 6.
