In rural areas, telemedicine offers patients the opportunity to get specialty health services and physician consultations without the need for extensive travel. Rural telemedicine may be the great equalizer for rural populations, which typically experience reduced services and less favorable health outcomes compared to populations served by large medical centers.
I was vacationing in a tiny, remote mountain town on the east coast last summer when I became ill. It was a Sunday evening and the local urgent care center didn’t open until the next morning. I didn’t want to wait 15 hours for urgent care, and I didn’t want to be driven to the regional ER, where I might have to wait a long time to be seen—and might be exposed to something contagious while in the waiting room.
Luckily, I had recently heard about one of the companies that provides urgent care visits via telemedicine. So I took out my iPad, loaded the app, and called in.
Graduate school or full-time job?
That was the question Phyllis Webster was pondering after getting her bachelor’s degree in cultural and biological anthropology from the University of Arizona. In late 1996, she opted for full-time job, as a research specialist with the newly formed Arizona Telemedicine Program (ATP).
Greg Hales used to really dislike going to the doctor.
“I didn’t dislike the doctor,” he says. “I just really disliked having to listen to whatever terrible news or reality show was blaring from the TV in the waiting room. It was so unpleasant. Then one day I thought, ‘Why don’t I just do something about this?’ That was when I set about creating a series of waiting room video loops, which play in North Country waiting rooms across the system."
Mariposa Community Health Center got its start in 1980 as a small clinic in Nogales, Arizona. It has grown over the years to be the largest provider of medical, dental and community-based health promotion and disease prevention services on the Arizona-Mexico border.
And in 1996, the clinic expanded its reach by becoming the first clinical site to link to the Arizona Telemedicine Program.
The decision was not a no-brainer. For many Nogales families, going to see a doctor in Tucson, 60 miles away, was a fun family outing, with lunch and shopping on the side. But for many others, the transportation logistics were next to impossible. For them, telemedicine would be a godsend.
But there were concerns about how well it would work.
