Look toward the camera and say ‘aah’
Look toward the camera and say aah’
Kids treated at school by telemedicine
Some inner-city Kansas City, KS, elementary school children are being treated via tele-medicine at their school nurse’s office through a program sponsored by the Center for Telemedi-cine and Telehealth at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
TeleKid Care began with four elementary schools and has expanded to 11 schools, says David Cook, PhD, acting director of the center.
When a child comes to the school nurse office, the nurse follows the traditional triage process to determine if the student needs to see a physician, then schedules a "visit" with a University of Kansas Medical Center doctor.
The kids are treated via telemedicine for typical childhood diseases such as ear infections, colds, and sore throats. The equipment includes a stethoscope and an otoscope attached to the computer.
Visits to a child psychiatrist are also arranged through the TeleKid Program.
Currently the physicians in the pediatrics and child psychiatry departments at Kansas City Medical Center are donating their time to the project, Cook says.
The program has the potential for teledentistry and for dermatological examinations, but the special scopes are too expensive for use in all the schools, he says.
Even though the school may be only a few miles away from the hospital, people who are advocates for these children believe they have a real challenge in accessing health care, Cook says.
If it weren’t for the TeleKid project, the children either wouldn’t get care at all or their parents would wait until the symptoms got so bad that they had to take them to the emergency room at night, he says. "We have a number of examples of kids who were identified early on as having particular conditions. That saves the whole system money."
Local and federal funding
About a two-thirds of the children seen through the program are in some kind of federal health care program. The other students either have private insurance or no insurance at all.
The school system funded the initial setup for the program. The hospital was able to expand it through a federal grant. Other grants and private donations are now funding the system.
The program has received wide acclaim both locally and nationally.
"We are a telemedicine department. TeleKid is one project that gets a lot of attention because we are treating underserved kids. A lot of projects have been around longer," Cook says.
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