June 11, 2010

By early July the California Telehealth Network (CTN) plans to announce the names of 50 to 100 of the 863 hospitals, clinics and medical facilities approved to get telehealth services as part of a federal pilot project, said CTN’s new Executive Director, Eric Brown.

“The goal is through the wonders of broadband to bring access to quality healthcare to communities which don’t have it. It’s an amazing transformation,” said Brown, who is based in the Univeristy of California, Davis Medical Center campus in Sacramento. The University of California Office of the President and the UC Davis Health System are leading the CTN consortium.

This technology will allow patients in rural or medically underserved areas to get medical expertise from any other participating medical facility in the state. Brown gives a scenario of a child who is involved in a car accident in Red Bluff and physicians are trying to decide if he should be transported to a trauma center by ambulance or MedEvac. Through a telemedicine conferencing session specialists elsewhere in the state can see the patient and monitor his vitals in order to make better decisions based on more comprehensive information.

Retinal scans for diabetics in rural areas is another potential use. But it’s not only rural areas that will be connected. Many residents of urban areas are finding it difficult to get adequate medical care. Of the 863 sites participating in the pilot, 40 percent are in urban areas, Brown said.

Continuing education for physicians will also be offered via the network as well as access to clinical research and possibly access to commercially hosted electronic health records systems.

A partnership of organizations headed by the University of California system formed in 2007 as part of a $22 million pilot project, funded by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC required 15 percent in matching funds and the California Emerging Technology Fund provided $3.6 million, Brown said. Other contributors include UnitedHealth, The California Teleconnect Fund, the National Coalition for Health Integration and the California Healthcare Foundation.

Once funded in January CTN solicited letters of authority from 1,000 medical facilities in rural and medically underserved areas. Of those, the FCC approved 863.

CTN has negotiated a $27 million, three-year contract with AT&T to build a secure telecommunications system tailored for medical use. It is designed to connect hundreds of healthcare providers all over California and will be one of the largest networks for that purpose in the nation, the CTN reported.

CTN is negotiating both good rates and quality of service with AT&T. If a provider were to try and conduct telemedicine over the Internet they may experience delays or signal degradation.

“This system eliminates all that,” Brown said. And the price to providers will be well below market rates, he added. For instance if you want a T1 line, the first three months are free and then it’s $50 monthly. You can’t get a better deal than that, Brown said.

And the rates are the same all over the state. Generally in rural areas there’s a distance charge, but everyone pays the same rate under the CTN contract with AT&T.

Although much of the emphasis of this pilot project is on rural medical providers, the goal is to create a statewide telehealth system connecting a majority of healthcare facilities in California.

“Telehealth and new information technologies can help overcome health disparities by bridging geographic distances, redistributing medical expertise and creating new venues for education,” said Dr. Thomas Nesbitt, associate vice chancellor for strategic technologies and alliances at UC Davis Health System in a press release.