Expo Raises Awareness of Telehealth Programs
| Sept. 29, 2015 | UAMS’ telehealth capabilities and outreach were on display recently at the first Telehealth Expo on the UAMS campus that truly made the event worthwhile.
Margaret Glasgow, left, visits with Sarah Rhoads-Kinder, D.N.P., Ph. D., at the Telehealth Expo.
“We had a nice cross section of people from all departments ranging from information technology and hospitality to physicians and attorneys,” said Erin Bush, project director for the South Central Telehealth Resource Center (SCTRC). “It was a true representation of UAMS with at least one person from almost every department.”
Telehealth is the use of telecommunications technologies for long-distance clinical health care as well as patient and professional health-related education and public health.
Organized by the UAMS Center for Distance Health (CDH) Education Team and the SCTRC, about 150 people attended the day-long expo Sept. 16 in the Lobby Gallery. The event included 15 booths representing the full diversity of telehealth programs on campus and a live demonstration of distance health in action with a simulated hand trauma consultation.
Jeffrey Clothier, M.D., left, talks to Jeff Pinto at one of the informational booths at the expo.
Bush said because telehealth programs typically serve patients and physicians outside Little Rock, there sometimes is greater awareness of those programs in the rest of the state.
With that in mind, organizers hoped with the expo to engage UAMS researchers while demonstrating that telehealth is part of the university’s clinical and educational missions and raising awareness that UAMS is a world leader in telehealth.
“We wanted to make sure everyone at UAMS knows that this program exists and to come to us if they want to start something with a telehealth component,” Bush said.
The telehealth programs represented by booths and program staff at the expo included: Arkansas Stroke Assistance and Virtual Emergency Support (AR SAVES), Antenatal and Neonatal Guidelines, Education and Learning System (ANGELS), Adult Telehealth, Psych TLC, Pediatric Telehealth, Arkansas E-Link, OB-GYN Telehealth in the Prison System, Tele-Rehabilitation Interventions through University-based Medicine for Prevention and Health (TRIUMPH), Adult Sickle Cell Clinical Program, CDH Live Interpreters, Arkansas Trauma System, UAMSpatientslearn.org, learnondemand.org, CDH and the SCTRC.