Dr. Pam Whitten Listen to Dr. Whitten

Department professor Pam Whitten helped organize an interactive one-day conference in October with Indiana health care providers and businesses to explore the role telemedicine plays in providing medical care.

Indiana is ranked 43rd in the nation when it comes to investment in telemedicine. Although the concept of telemedicine (providing health care services via telecommunications such as the telephone, Internet or videoconferencing) is almost half a decade old, there are still vast unexplored opportunities for telemedicine in Indiana. Providing health care to underserved rural areas is just one example among the problems telemedicine could solve.

On Oct. 20 at the Purdue Engagement Office in Indianapolis, the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering organized the Indiana Telehealth Policy Conference, aimed at opening more avenues for telemedicine in the state. Aalmost 60 experts representing key health care systems, telecommunication vendors and other state agencies brainstormed strategies for an effective development of telemedicine .

The first part of the conference began with a crash course on telemedicine offered by Whitten, who is also a Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering faculty scholar, that brought everyone on the same page. Whitten has helped launch telemedicine projects in rural hospitals, school nurses' offices, inner-city elementary schools, community mental health centers and jail settings in Kansas and Michigan. Whitten joined the faculty at Purdue in August and is now focusing on advancing telemedicine in Indiana.

Next, Jon Rahman, M.D., from St. Vincent's, Greg Beck from Riley Children's Hospital and Peter Woodbridge, M.D., from Indianapolis Veterans Administration, charted current applications of telemedicine in Indiana linking patients and health providers.

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Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering

In the second part, the participants broke in to five small groups that discussed concerns and opportunities regarding licensure, reimbursement, law, infrastructure, market potential, and role of education.

The result of this intense work day will be a white paper that will be "more than a fancy document posted on the Web, but it will give us the momentum for the next pragmatic steps to be taken," said Whitten.

Leonard Betley, president of Regenstrief Foundation, mentioned that Indiana has unique characteristics that would give Hoosiers a leg up in the field of telemedicine. "We have unique academic institutions like Regenstrief Institute, Regenstrief Center for Health Care Engineering, Purdue University, and Indiana University that make Indiana a research-friendly place; we have a business community that supports initiatives in this area; we have private funders interested in this area."

All these, as Betley said, make telemedicine "a dream worth pursuing in Indiana."

Support for the meeting and research project was provided by the Regenstrief Center at Purdue. The center, supported by three-year start-up funding of $1 million annually from the Regenstrief Foundation in Indianapolis, brings together researchers from various science and liberal arts fields to work with representatives of the health care industry to find ways to improve access to and delivery of health care.