Interactive Videoconferencing Improves Nutrition Intervention in a Rural Population

Abstract

Patient education provided by a specialist has been recognized as an essential component in assisting patients with disease prevention or managing chronic, debilitating illness ( (1) Tunks E Bellissimo A Behavioral Medicine Concepts and Procedures. Pergamon Press Inc, Elmsford, NY1991 Google Scholar ). In rural underserved areas, this counseling may be perceived by patients as important but not valued sufficiently to warrant traveling a distance to access it. Since telemedicine eliminates the travel barrier, will patients who have it available use patient education services more? Are they as satisfied as they would have been had they had the service in person? This report focuses on two issues: patient satisfaction with the nutrition counseling services and improvement in keeping scheduled appointments through the use of telemedicine. It is based on results from the baseline survey and data collected from the subsequent use of telemedicine at Bassett Healthcare, a vertically integrated system located in a ten-county area in rural central New York, served by an intrasystem-wide area telecommunications network for voice, data, and video. Equipment in use includes group system videoconferencing units at the hospitals, and desktop units at the health centers. Transmission rate is routinely 112/128kbs.