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Home
health receives grant: $314,000 will fund rural telemedicine improvements
By
Stephen Mills, the Barre Montpelier Times Argus Central Vermont Home Health and Hospice has received a $314,000 grant to improve “rural telemedicine” from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Distance Learning and Telemedicine Program. The grant will allow the home health program to go hi-tech with the purchase of 25 telemedicine monitoring units. It will also provide automated laptop technology for CVHHH’s 55 professional clinicians who make home visits. Telemedicine home monitoring units are used primarily by high-risk cardiac and diabetes patients. Patients are prompted by the home monitoring unit to take their own vital signs, and the results are sent to a CVHHH nurse daily. “Home monitoring units can help save lives and decrease hospitalization by recognizing early signs of heart failure,” said CVHHH President and CEO Eileen Blake. Blake said the telemedicine grant will allow a visiting nurse to enter medical notes and digital photographs of a patient’s wounds on a laptop computer in the patient’s home. Previously, the information was recorded longhand and had to be re-entered at CVHHH’s central office, creating delays in diagnosis and care. “Providing home health care to our rural residents can be challenging,” said Jolinda LaClair of the USDA’s Rural Development Program. “Because of the rural nature of our state, many of the residents are economically and geographically challenged. I am pleased that Rural Development has been able to help CVHHH obtain a way to provide the daily oversight that many of these patients need.” The telemedicine grant will also help to reduce the amount of time health care providers spend on paperwork. “The nurses and physician therapists who make visits day and night are my eyes and ears in patients’ homes,” said Dr. Peter Hale, an internist and Chairman of the Central Vermont Medical Board of Directors. “The CVHHH technology project will streamline communication and data collection among health care providers, clearly benefiting patient care and the collaboration between providers in the home, office and hospital setting.” Each CVHHH nurse spends an average of two hours a day on paperwork, Blake said. Based on current studies, CVHHH estimates the telemedicine technology will reduce paperwork for a clinician by a minimum of 50 percent, she said. “We serve 85 percent more people than we did a decade a go,” said
Blake. “The exponential growth in patients — combined with an aging
population, a national nursing shortage and a dramatic escalation in
paperwork — are serious challenges facing rural home care in central The grant goes a long way towards the $500,000 CVHHH plans to raise for
technology improvements in a $2 million capital campaign to improve its
facilities and services. The agency is raising the other $1.5 million for
an expansion of its Blake said the USDA grant, combined with private donations brings CVHHH’s campaign total to just over the halfway mark of $1 million. “With continued community support, we are certain to meet our goal,” Blake said.
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