Are you prepared to take advantage of opportunities to consult with your healthcare providers remotely? Do you know what it’s going to take to be prepared?

I’ve been following the development of this initiative in California for the last three years and I invite you to think of the post below as the starting gun … on a race that will have many heats.

How is telemedicine getting a foothold in your community? I’d love to hear more if you’re willing to leave a comment below…

Health care takes digital leap forward

By Bobby Caina Calvan bcalvan@sacbee.com

Imagine a doctor listening to the heartbeat of a patient half a world away. Or a young child opening wide into the peering lens of a high-definition camera. And doctors collaborating online, exchanging digital X-rays, MRIs and potential diagnoses.

Dr. Thomas Nesbitt, right, announces the birth of the California Telehealth Network by demonstrating a live linkup with three UC Davis Medical Center telemedicine locations. Using broadband technology, specialists will be able to assist local doctors in faraway communities.

Telemedicine’s future took another leap forward Tuesday with the launch of the California Telehealth Network, the most ambitious foray yet into the rapidly developing field that links doctors and patients via high-tech tools.

“What it means is that no matter where you are in this huge state, you’ll have access to the expertise you need and the best medical care,” said Dr. Thomas Nesbitt, director of the Center for Health and Technology for the UC Davis Health System.

Initially, just 50 clinics, hospitals and other health care providers in California will tap into a broadband network that could eventually link nearly 900 facilities statewide by the end of 2011.

“California is showing the way,” said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger during a Tuesday ceremony at the UC Davis Medical Center.

The medical center will serve as the control center for the new network and will help the state develop its telemedicine infrastructure. The telehealth network is expected to cost $30 million, with about $22 million from the federal government as part of the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program, an effort to improve health care in rural America.

With the telemedicine network, more Californians, particularly those in far-flung areas, will have access to medicine’s best and brightest, Schwarzenegger said.

“It should not be a matter of how rich you are or where you live,” he said. “We are celebrating the future of medicine, also known as telemedicine.”

That future couldn’t come soon enough for the family of Rennee Wilson, a young Shasta County girl whose skull was fractured earlier this month during a traffic accident near Redding.

The 3-year-old was in need of immediate care, and the trip from Redding to the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento would have consumed precious hours and possibly exposed the patient to additional medical trauma.

Instead, using video cameras that streamed real-time images from Redding to Sacramento, doctors collaborated on saving the girl’s life. From 160 miles away in Sacramento, Dr. James Marcin, a UC Davis associate professor of pediatrics critical care, assisted the intensive care physicians in Redding.

Using the latest telemedicine technology, he consulted with his remote partners on digital images that revealed a fractured skull. He recommended the drugs to administer and even when the Redding doctors should remove the ventilator after she could breathe on her own.

“They needed my brains more than they needed my hands,” Marcin said.

The girl’s family was thankful that they didn’t need to travel to Sacramento for her critical care. “The technology was awesome,” said Phillip Potter, the child’s grandfather.

Telemedicine has been around for years. But until recently, much of the technology has been crude – landline phones that offered no video, dial-up Internet that took an eternity to transmit images or grainy black-and-white videos that were of little use to diagnose an ailing patient.

Today, broadband technology is allowing sophisticated instruments to tap into the Internet’s high-speed digital currents. For example, stethoscopes can be connected to equipment that allows a doctor to remotely listen to a heartbeat. Other equipment allows doctors to examine a wound or see into a patient’s mouth, ears and other parts of the body.

That means physicians now have the ability to treat a patient without ever being in the same room or physically touching them.

“When telemedicine started, no one knew what high-definition was,” said Nesbitt, the medical center’s technology director. “Now we can look into someone’s ear to get a clear picture of an eardrum and look directly into an eye.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

I’ve been touching the holy quite a bit over the last 4 weeks. Taking time to feel the passage into my 6th decade. I hope you’re all enjoying this glorious summer, too!

What a privilege to tarry…

A Report From the Field

This fall, I piloted a 4-week, face-to-face, hands-on Cloud Computing course for seniors and aging Baby Boomers who aren’t yet ready to call ourselves “Seniors”

I call the course, “Up, Up and Away,” and I promise to take people who are frustrated with their desktop computing experiences from hair-pulling to happy smiles and thicker wallets in just four weeks using a cheap mobile computer and Cloud apps. The first folks who signed up were my neighbors in the Mountain Meadows Community in Ashland, Oregon. In four weeks, participants made faster strides than even I had anticipated!

I took their performance as affirmation of three things:

1) The course design is sound and provides a useful scaffold for people who want to create a whole new relationship to computing to do so in just 4 weeks
2) Seniors can and do learn new tricks a whole lot faster than people might give them credit for
3) Mobile computers and Web 2.0 Cloud apps are going to change all of our lives – not just the lives of young people!

The photos above were made on Friday the 13th when a big crowd turned out for the Mountain Meadows‘ November “Friday Forum” to hear me talk about the way I look at new opportunities for seniors who willing to invest in cheap laptops or netbooks and learn to use free Cloud apps. New online ways to engage in lifetime learning, telehealth options, telemedicine options, meaningful online community participation, inexpensive (or free) connection to family members and other caregivers – wherever they are! And so much more… My deepest thanks to Cindy Earle and Hunter Hill for the photos!

I’m just crazy about my neighbors at Mountain Meadows! They’re all so smart! And they’ve moved into this community to manage their lives in new ways while they “Age in Place.” Coming to live among them has been a life-changing experience for me, personally. As a group, they’re deeply committed both to their own lifetime learning and to maintaining healthy, active relationships with the people they care about – here and across the globe! So, over the next 6 months or more, I’m going to be taking groups of 12 of them “up in the Cloud,” using “Up, Up and Away” as the vehicle. If the first group’s success was any indication of what’s to come for Mountain Meadows, this community will soon be setting a national standard for active, senior communities using the internet, social media, and virtual meeting technologies to optimize resources for “Aging in Place.”

I’m excited about “Up, Up and Away!”! And I’m looking for opportunities to offer it locally while I also finish a train-the-trainer program so that people who would like to can offer it in your areas.

I very much want to share my introductory talk, “Computer Frustrate Me – Why Should I Care About Them?” with churches, clubs, professional groups and at professional conferences several times a month during December, January and February and on into 2010. But I don’t know how to do this without investing lots of time or money on marketing.

Got any ideas?