The Arizona Telemedicine Program Blog, Category: Patients

¡Vida! emerged from work with breast cancer survivors who, despite five years or more since the breast cancer diagnosis, clearly articulated their goal not only to live, but to live well.

Named from the Spanish word meaning “life,” ¡Vida! is a monthly partner educational series for patients and their professional health care teams. Guided by a broad-based Community Partnership Group, ¡Vida! has been proactively addressing the identified needs of patients and their families across the state of Arizona.

While ¡Vida! originally began with a focus on breast cancer survivorship, the series has evolved to include topics related to lifestyle medicine, wellness, and advocacy with the overarching goal of engaging Arizona’s citizens in their own health!

For one man struggling with congestive heart failure, it means not feeling alone anymore. 

For another patient – a woman in kidney failure who was too sick to be placed on the transplant waiting list – it has so improved her health that she is now eligible for a donor kidney.

Both have benefited from an innovative program of Flagstaff-based Northern Arizona Healthcare and a partner hospital, Flagstaff Medical Center. More recently, Verde Valley Medical Center in Cottonwood has signed on.

Called Care Beyond Walls and Wires, it’s a telemedicine-based, home-health monitoring program that has significantly improved the health of most participating patients, while reducing emergency room visits and hospital admissions and readmissions, and decreasing the length of stay for those who still require hospitalization.