Firm Helping Rural Residents Get to See a Doctor--Via Video

It is often challenging for residents of the rural North Dakota towns of Mohall, Bottineau, Parshall and Velva to make it to big city hospitals for their specialized health-care needs.

Long distances, high travel costs and inclement weather can be large roadblocks, particularly for the senior citizens in these communities.

But with the help of a Ventura County systems integration firm, the critical diagnoses and treatments that these people require are starting to come more quickly and easily.

CyberOptions of Westlake Village is teaming up with the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society and the National Institute for Long Term Care to establish telemedicine work sites at clinics in eight small, remote towns.

Through high-speed telephone networks, the program is linking the long-term care facilities operated by the Good Samaritan Society with distant hospitals and clinics, enabling physicians to treat clients by live video.

The system also allows Good Samaritan Society personnel to conduct certain audio and video exams--including those in the fields of dermatology, ophthalmology, and heart and lungs--and transmit them to off-site physicians for review.

The project, expected to be completed by late December, is being funded by a $330,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, under the organization’s Distance Learning and Telemedicine Grant Program.

CyberOptions and the Good Samaritan Society each contributed additional capital to bring the total program funding to more than $700,000.

Although focusing on the elderly clients of the Good Samaritan Society, the telemedicine system will be made available to the general public in the designated western North Dakota communities.

“This is a big step for our company,” said Michael Smith, director of telemedicine for CyberOptions. “It’s our first implementation of a telemedicine program.”

“And we are involved in discussions with a variety of other health systems and academic medical centers too,” he said. “Each [medical] organization needs to take a look at how they deliver care and where they fall short of their goals and objectives.”

CyberOptions was founded about four years ago by a group of businessmen with backgrounds in the defense industry, biotechnology, telecommunications and information systems. It was only recently that company officials looked seriously at the health-care industry.

“Rural communities provide a very large opportunity to pursue,” Smith said. “Really, a better definition is underserved populations, and that encompasses most rural communities and it also encompasses large urban populations.”

For the Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Good Samaritan Society, a nonprofit organization that runs 235 long-term care facilities in 26 states, the eight-town pilot program could be just the start to a large network of telemedicine sites.

“The ability to do diagnostics and consultation either live on video or to store on video or tapes and forward them, this is a very exciting prospect for us,” said Dr. Jim Beddow, vice president of the society and executive director of the National Institute for Long Term Care.

“We are a deeply rural organization--about 60% of our locations are in communities of 10,000 or less, so access to health-care services is a major issue,” he said. “It’s not unusual for us to have to take some of our residents 50 to 60 miles, and in January in North Dakota, that’s not pretty. We’re excited about bringing resources to where our folks are, rather than taking them to the resources.”

With the technology falling into place, Beddow said, the trick will be to train staff members in the remote communities on how to take full advantage of it.

“Technology is finally catching up with the needs of rural America--and it’s going to take cooperation on the part of the communities, the telephone companies and the Good Samaritans,” Beddow said.

“We need to know, what does it take technically, what are the education and technical issues, so that the paraprofessionals on our end can work with the specialists on the other end,” he said. “Working out the human networks and resourcing needs is what we are really testing in these pilot programs.”