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."

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