In some rural parts of Illinois, even the most basic health care service is a long drive and difficult to access. However, new efforts are underway to bring basic preventative services to rural Illinois counties through a network of strategically placed telehealth kiosks. It’s being led by Carle Illinois College of Medicine and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty members.
The team, led by CI MED Health Innovation Professor Ujjal Mukherjee and Ann Willemsen-Dunlap from OSF Healthcare, is using a $100 thousand grant from the Jump Arches program to evaluate the effectiveness of using telehealth kiosks to offer first-line preventive health screenings to rural and under-served communities. “The primary obstacles to care are associated with affordability, access to health care, and awareness of primary and preventative care,” Mukherjee said. “We believe that this intervention will simultaneously solve several of these societal issues for a wide section of the population.”
The new kiosks will be placed in easily accessible locations within rural communities, such as popular stores. They will be equipped with the technology to connect virtually with community health workers who are trained to conduct non-invasive preventative screenings, including measuring body temperature, blood pressure, body weight, and verbal screening of general health conditions. “The idea is to improve the frequency and ease of initial contact with the health care process for populations that generally have limited contact due to social or economically under-served and disadvantaged conditions,” Mukherjee said.
The team hopes that regular, convenient health assessments will help people in rural areas become proactive in monitoring and improving their health. “Individuals from under-served communities may not fully understand the importance of preventative health care and its potential benefits,” Mukherjee said. “The focus is on building health awareness and conducting initial screening for further referrals to providers,” he said.
Mukherjee, who is also a professor in the Gies College of Business, says the kiosks make sense from an economic standpoint. “The kiosks are likely to be more affordable and sustainable than other similar interventions like traditional telemedicine alone, or by assigning community health workers to contact individuals,” he said. “We believe that the kiosks are scalable and address the social issues of attention, awareness, and technology hesitancy and access simultaneously.”
The grant funding will pay for designing and deploying the health kiosks. The project also offers CI MED students the opportunity to get involved and engage with the health care delivery process to under-served communities. Community health workers are being trained with materials created through CI MED Professor Ruby Mendenhall’s $500 thousand MacArthur Grant project aimed at reducing disparities in health care.
In addition to Mukherjee and Willemsen-Dunlap, primary collaborators include CI MED Health Innovation Professor Sridhar Seshadri from the Gies College of Business, CI MED Associate Dean for Diversity and Democratization of Health Innovation Ruby Mendenhall, and Assistant Professor Subhonmesh Bose from The Grainger College of Engineering.