Walking the wire: Technologies across an academic career

Abstract

Academic health centers provide a broad range of services spanning the teaching, research, and service missions. Secure video teleconferencing can support training and supervision of health-care trainees across distance and allow expanded continuing education opportunities for rural providers. Academic faculty can play important roles in identifying and developing innovative solutions that improve telehealth technologies and ensure maximal effectiveness of such applications in clinical care. With effective telehealth tools, service providers can offer timely, efficient, and targeted services to patients from rural communities across a tertiary care academic medical center’s catchment area, resulting in better care and less travel burden on patients and families. This chapter reviews how telehealth technologies have been applied across teaching, research, and service missions to serve patients and families and to improve health service delivery.