Arkansas Gets $1 Million Grant to Expand Telehealth Training

Healthcare providers in the Arkansas Delta will soon have access to telehealth training services.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) has received a grant of almost $1 million from the US Department of Agriculture to set up digital health training services at telehealth training centers around the region, which covers a wide swath of the western half of the state.

The effort targets a continuing challenge to connected health adoption: Providers and patients won’t embrace the new technology if they don’t know how to use it. Studies have shown that people living in underserved areas will use mHealth and telehealth if they’ve been given the opportunity to try things out and if supported by care providers.

Officials in Arkansas say that’s keeping care providers in one of the most rural regions of the state from addressing care disparities.

“A person living in the southern Delta of Arkansas has an expected lifespan 10 years less than that of a similar person in northwest Arkansas,” Joseph Sanford, MD, interim director of the UAMS Institute for Digital Health and Information, said in a press release. “The training centers will be in counties where education in digital health practices can help to address this disparity.”

“Roughly half of Arkansas counties are in the Mississippi Delta region, and their populations are rural and medically underserved,” added Hari Eswaran, PhD, principal investigator for the grant project and the institute’s director of research. “Doctor Sanford, the institute and I are glad to begin working with the Arkansas Rural Health Partnership and Jefferson Regional to show how digital health technology can help to fill that longstanding need and improve the health of people there.”

The grant will be used to create a series of in-person and virtual training sessions for providers, business and community leaders, students and consumers. They’ll be held in Arkansas Rural Health Partnership (ARHP) offices in Lake Village and at the Jefferson regional Medical Center School of Nursing in Pine Bluff and the UAMS East Regional Campus at Helena-West Helena.