Telehealth as an Everyday Tool

At the University of Missouri, our long involvement in telemedicine has been motivated not only by academic curiosity but also by a very practical desire to find out whether and how telemedicine can help deliver better rural health care in the growing number of communities we serve. Although studies of focused applications are valuable, our questions involved the feasibility and value of telemedicine as a routine part of an actual rural health care system that handles a broad spectrum of everyday problems. Lack of physician acceptance in earlier projects suggested that, even when dealing with relatively established applications of telemedicine, the usability of such applications outside of narrowly focused demonstration projects was an open question. This abstract focuses not on the findings of specific studies but on the broader lessons we have learned about telehealth in everyday health care during the Rural Telemedicine Evaluation Project (RTEP).