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Indian Wells Valley Receives Network Grant from the California Telemedicine and Telehealth Center
by Earl W. Ferguson, M.D. and Debbie Robertson Local Coordinator, Ridgecrest
With the sponsorship of the Indian Wells Valley Community Health Council, Ridgecrest Regional Hospital, together with Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine, Toiyabe Indian Health Project in Bishop, and Bakersfield Heart Hospital, have been awarded a two-year, $335,000 grant from the California Telehealth and Telemedicine Center (CTTC) to design a telehealth (TH) and telemedicine (TM) network in the Eastern Sierras. The Southeastern Sierra Integrated Regional Information Network, or SSIRIN as the project is called, will be established using TCP/IP Internet architecture. SSIRIN targets populations in remote rural areas east of the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range, and will provide medical, educational, and community network services to the underserved populations of these rural areas. While the targeted areas are large in size, totaling more than 18,000 square miles or roughly 12 per cent of California's total area, they are sparsely populated: according to a January 1999 Kern County Census report, the region's total population is approximately 135,000, with the Ridgecrest incorporated area ranking the most populous at only 27,500 people.
The City of Ridgecrest currently offers superior medical services, but lacks many subspecialty care providers and opportunities to seek consultation. Residents of the Indian Wells Valley and the proposed TH/TM network service area must often seek care outside their community, traveling upwards of 90 to 150 miles each way, or wait for planned weekly or monthly visits from selected specialists. Implementation of SSIRIN will greatly enhance the specialty health care available in the region.
A planning grant awarded by CTTC in 1999 to Ridgecrest Regional Hospital (RRH) gave the SSIRIN participants an opportunity to obtain technical expertise, when a technical consultant from the University of California at Davis visited sites and met with collaborating agencies to help design their network. The information gained allowed SSIRIN participants to build a network that best fit the technical and clinical needs and capabilities of the region's providers.
Ridgecrest Regional Hospital will be the region's TH/TM hub and will provide and maintain connections to consultation resources outside the area. The first link will be set up between RRH and Bakersfield Heart Hospital (BHH) to support and enhance telemedicine consultations.
Initial TH/TM spoke sites will be established at Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine, Toiyabe Indian Health Project in Bishop, and Mammoth Hospital. Provider clinics in Ridgecrest will also be connected to the network as consultant sites.
We believe the future of telehealth and telemedicine lies in integrated healthcare information systems that tie all information sources together to make health care information available wherever it is needed, regardless of distance. Network superstructures like SSIRIN, which connect intranets to wide area networks (WANs) and the Internet, will likely continue to be the primary means of TH/TM communications. Web browser applications, including extensible markup language (XML), will revolutionize our abilities to exchange and track health care data through electronic medical records. The establishment of SSIRIN will also help us explore and investigate unique TH/TM rural applications, including novel uses of Internet, extranet, and web browser applications.
© CIRHM