Featuring Louise Burns, Lead Tele-Health Coordinator for the Northport Veterans Administration

On Tuesday, March 8th at 2pm EST, Susan Baida, Co-Founder of eCareDiary will interview Louise Burns, the Lead Tele-Health Coordinator at the Northport VA Medical Center. Ms. Burns is in charge of the Tele-Health Program, a care coordination process by which the Northport VA Center works with veterans in their home and in community clinics to increase access to services for veterans.

The goal of Tele-Health is to provide the right care to patients at the right time and at the right place. There are three forms Tele-Health takes. The first, delivering care to the home; second, delivering it to community-based clinics; and finally, a third process by which images of patient’s retinas are taken and transmitted to a location where they can be read by an expert. The home Tele-Health devices are able to work over cable and internet lines – they are simple, portable in-home messaging devices. Patients provide information over these devices about their conditions; for example, congestive heart failure, diabetes, chronic obstructive lung disease, depression and high blood pressure – and they can then receive patient education over the same device.

Tele-Health now has five vendors in use for the home program. Four of those are for the in-home messaging devices, and one is for a video phone in which they call the patient and see the patient on the screen. Each of the four messaging devices has specific features that allow Tele-Health to pick the right device to meet the patient’s needs. All of the devices provide a way of communicating with the VA and have on-going communication with the staff.



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