Thirty rural hospitals across New Mexico will soon have instant access to neurological and neurosurgery consults, thanks to a $15 million telehealth grant being supplied by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The funding, awarded through CMS' Innovation Center, will support the state's Access to Critical Cerebral Emergency Support Services (ACCESS) initiative by making experts at the Albuquerque-based University of New Mexico Health Science Center's Department of Neurosurgery available for telemedicine consults. The goal is to make critical clinical care available at hospitals throughout the state and reduce the need for costly, time-consuming and sometimes-risky transports to UNM.
"Small hospitals provide essential emergency services in many of New Mexico's rural communities, and telehealth technologies are an effective way to expand patients' access to fast and reliable emergency care options," Sen. Tom Udall, D-NM, said in a press release announcing the funding. "New Mexico has been a leader in telemedicine, and this project is another example of how to build a medical network statewide to support rural healthcare."
The effort was spearheaded by Howard Yonas, a professor and chairman of neurosurgery at UNM. Along with providing 24/7 telemedicine support, the funding will be used to equip and train physicians, nurses, radiology technicians and administrative staff at small rural and community hospitals across the state and enable those on Medicare and Medicaid to receive free neurological consultations at participating hospitals.
"This important federal investment will help develop a more effective and efficient telemedicine network to expand its reach across New Mexico," Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM, said in the press release. "Telehealth presents the opportunity to reverse the longstanding paradigm of placing the burden on patients to seek care where it is physically available. By eliminating archaic barriers and expanding opportunities for remote healthcare, hospital patients, including those in our rural communities, will have access to the best medical experts around the state available to them."
New Mexico has a long history of telehealth innovation, thanks in large part to UNM's Health Science Center. The project to push neurological and neurosurgical telemedicine out to rural hospitals gained steam last July when the hospital, under Yonas' guidance, completed a five-year project to connect UNM to 13 hospitals around the state. At that time, UNM officials said almost 40 percent of patients who were transported to UNM for emergency neurological treatment – sometimes at a cost of $30,000 per patient – could have remained at their own hospital if that hospital was equipped with telemedicine technology.
"(W)hat we're trying to do is to be able to reduce the costs of these transports and be able to provide immediacy to that patient - healthcare coverage by a specialist who has treated thousands of patients and knows exactly what to look for," Dick Govatski, president and CEO of Net Medical Xpress, an Albuquerque-based provider of telemedicine technology who's working with UNM to complete the hookups, said in a July 23, 2103 story in mHealth News.
