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By KALEY LYON
Hays Daily News
Hays Medical Center recently received a federal grant of nearly $500,000 to improve regional telemedicine services.
The additional money, announced by Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., earlier this month, will be used to purchase digital imaging equipment for eight regional hospitals.
"We're very fortunate, Kansans are," said Jodi Schmidt, chief development officer at HMC. "Our congressmen are great about helping us go after federal funds for these sorts of things."
The NovaRad technology will allow rural hospital to transfer digital images, like patient X-rays, to Hays Medical Center and other facilities.
If these entities had to install the new technology out of pocket, it would have cost about $70,000 per facility, she said.
As telemedicine services have continued to expand, the hospital has applied for and received several grants to benefit regional healthcare, which have totaled about $4 million in the past 10 years, Schmidt said.
The most recent grant, however, probably is the largest single grant the program has received, she said.
"These grants are really competitive so we're really, really pleased that we were selected," she said. "There is such an emphasis at the federal level on health care utilization of technology that they seem to be a funding source that's looking for these kinds of projects and bringing them to rural areas where we might not be able to afford to do it without grant money."
These improvements also will allow transferred digital images to be analyzed by professional radiologists, who are not always available, Schmidt said.
"The images can follow the patient, whether the patient comes here or whether the patient has to go somewhere else for services we don't provide," she said. "This kind of puts us all on the same system."
This service also will improve patient care. If a patient has tests run at one of these hospitals, transferring the images to HMC will prevent tests from being repeated and hopefully improve the speed of diagnosis, said Margie Hammerschmidt, imaging and radiation services director.
"By just being able to have access to images that were taken in the patient's hometown, we're really looking for it to increase the quality and continuity of care," Hammerschmidt said. "And the speed."
Implementation of this new technology will begin in regional hospitals on Nov. 1 -- employees with HMC's information technology department will help set up the new equipment, said Scott Rohleder, IT director.
"Speeding up the cure for the patient and diagnosis is really the key that we're trying to focus on," Rohleder said. "That's our ultimate goal here, is to make things more efficient and better quality. That's the vision that we as a whole have adopted here."
Reporter Kaley Lyon can be reached at (785) 628-1081 Ext. 138, or by e-mail at klyon@dailynews.net.
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