Liberal Arts Magazine

Here's to Your Health: Liberal Arts faculty diagnose health-care
delivery in 'living laboratories'
By Amy Patterson Neubert

When a child feels sick during the school day, there may not always be
a school nurse available at that elementary school who can care for the
child.

Telemedicine may change that some day. Telemedicine, which is an
electronic form of health-care administered through the Internet or
videoconferencing, is one of the many issues of health-care delivery
that faculty in a new center at Purdue is studying.

Purdue's Regenstrief (REE-gen-streef) Center for Healthcare Engineering
brings together researchers from fields such as communication,
sociology, epidemiology, engineering, nursing, management and
technology to work with representatives of the health-care industry to
find ways to improve access to and delivery of health care. These
researchers will work in "living laboratories" around the state,
including facilities administered by St. Vincent Health Inc., which
serves a 45-county central Indiana region.

Pam Whitten, a newly hired professor of communication with a joint
appointment to Regenstrief, is already working on assessing the role
telemedicine can play in Indiana's health-care system. She will split
her time between the Department of Communication and the center.

"Multiple telemedicine projects using telemedicine equipment with video
and peripheral components to measure, record and transmit a person's
blood pressure, heart and lung sounds can prolong a home health or
hospice patient's abilities to stay in their home versus being
hospitalized," says Whitten, who started Kansas' telemedicine program
through the University of Kansas Medical Center in 1995.

She also worked on projects involving telehospice, telehome care and
telepsychiatry from 1998 to the spring of 2005 while she was at
Michigan State University.

"Telemedicine is really about improving access to care," Whitten says.
"Whether it's a small community that lacks primary care services or a
larger area that could benefit from specialists, telemedicine can
provide preventive services that can improve quality of life while
saving money in the end."

Telemedicine could easily be implemented in schools, where the
nationwide nursing shortage and budget cuts in public schools have left
many school nurses' stations empty or operated by parent volunteers or
itinerant nurses, Whitten says. With telemedicine, when a sick child
comes to the office, the school staff can link to a school nurse
elsewhere who can make a preliminary diagnosis.

"Someday we won't even differentiate between health care and
telemedicine because telemedicine will be a regular form of daily
health care," says Howard Sypher, professor of communication and
department head. "The 'tele' will be invisible. A consultation with a
specialist through your personal computer will be no different than
seeing your doctor face to face."

Sypher, and Mark Lawley, associate professor of industrial
engineering, are the first two faculty scholars at Regenstrief, which
is administratively housed in the e-Enterprise Center in Discovery
Park. Sypher and Lawley spent much of the spring semester visiting
health-care providers to build partnerships and identify potential
living laboratories for Purdue researchers.

"The improvement of health-care delivery requires a complex array of
resources, and this includes utilizing the expertise of faculty who
usually do not work in health fields," says Sypher, who is an expert in
communication and technology.

Comprehensive Mental Health Services, based in Muncie, Ind., is one
organization working with the new Regenstrief Center, specifically to
develop a brand and marketing communication strategy to better provide
and promote its services.

Sypher recruited Jay Wang, assistant professor of communication, to
work on the branding effort because of Wang's professional expertise
and scholarship in marketing and communication in a wide range of
sectors including media, consumer products, retail, financial services,
healthcare and non-profit. Wang is also partnering with Mohan
Dutta-Bergman, associate professor of communication who specializes in
health; and Richard Widdows, professor and department head of consumer
sciences and retailing, and Sandra Liu, associate professor of consumer
sciences and retailing, for this project.

"What's different with mental-health services is that there is a social
stigma that we must consider," Wang says. "Because of the stigma
associated with behavioral health issues it's likely that these
invaluable services are underutilized. So, we will need to determine
how we can effectively market this kind of care despite the stigmas."

Comprehensive Mental Health Services is expected to announce its new
brand and communication strategy this fall. After that the Purdue team
will continue to be involved with the marketing and managing of the
plan, as well as analyzing changes in client use.

Wang and Sypher also are working with Purdue engineers to help the
Indiana Health Information Exchange to develop a wireless link among
Indiana health-care providers. The goal is to encourage more
health-care providers to move away from paper files and utilize more
forms of telemedicine to make health-care delivery more efficient.

"Working with Regenstrief in an interdisciplinary environment really
complements my professional development," Wang says. "It also allows us
to see immediately how we are helping people."

This is exactly what James Anderson, professor of medical sociology who
was part of the team that proposed the idea for the Regenstrief center,
had in mind.

"When we created the idea for this center, we knew that almost every
area of the university would be part of the effort to improve the
delivery of health-care," said Anderson, who is working with Ranga
Ramanujam, an assistant professor of management, in reducing medication
errors. "I also think these partnerships and projects will certainly
influence my colleagues' approach to research and how it can benefit
health-care consumers."