>NEW & NOTEWORTHY : Back to Public Relations Archives

Sunflower County medical pioineer wants to bring telemedicine to Mississippi

The Mississippi Link, Local, February 28-March 6, 2002
Carole Cannon, Staff Writer

In the remote countryside of Ecuador, people suffered.  In need of surgeries, medicine or vaccinations, they would not seek out medical attention except in the direst of circumstances, and the, it was often too late.  They distrusted the few medical professionals in far-off villages who didn't have the resources to provide the kind of medical and health care people needed even if they would come for it.

The out of a science fiction movie rolled a mobile van that was part emergency room, part doctor's office, bringing space age technology to treat people who didn't even have running water.

The mobile was Dr. James "Butch" Rosser's new age baby.  And one day while he was directing the mobile's team over the one phone line for miles around, he realized that conditions there were not much different from those in the Mississippi Delta.  

Plagued with symptoms that also often go untreated: the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the developing world, the highest rates of heart disease in the country - rates that are not decreasing as quickly as they are in other states.  Abject poverty, high illiteracy rates and too few doctors and nurses to treat people, in this place that looks as if it has been frozen in time, who also distrust a medical system that has failed them in the past.

"I said here I am doing this in Ecuador, and I'm from (Moorhead) Mississippi," Rosser recalls.  He decided then that he wanted to help make history at home like he has been doing in the rest of the world for years.

Rosser, a pioneer in the areas of laparoscopic surgery and telemedicine, charmed his audience of medical of medical and health care professionals from across the state with his downhome style at the second annual Primary Care Clinical Conference in Hattiesburg earlier this month.  The conference was sponsored by the Mississippi Health Care Association, which includes 21 community health care centers across the state.

Considered one of the finest surgeons practicing today, Rosser's work in telemedicine - medical professionals in one place caring for patients in another - has pushed medicine past science fiction limites into ground breaking explorations in cyberspace.

Driven by his belief that the current medical model of expecting people to go to medical care is failing miserably, Rosser, has designed several award-winning projects that prove, he said, how much more effective and cost efficient it is to take medical care to people.

An associate professor at Yale University School of Medicine, Rosser said it is crucial to identify the problem, and let it dictate the technology that will be used to solve it.  No matter how spectacular cutting edge technology is, if it is not designed to meet specific medical and public health needs, it will work no better than now obsolete technology that the medical world also thought would work wonders.

"You can't just pile up technology on top of the problem," he said, "you have to integrate it into the process of solving the problem."

In Operation Raid Forest, for instance, a mobile truck was outfitted with electricity because the only village for miles didn't have any.  There was only one phone line, and Rosser used to directed the truck's team via his computer from his office.

The truck, which cost $150,000, took medical teams across the remotest parts of the country, examining and treating 4,000 people more than four years, including performing complicated surgery with an infection rate the same as Yale's (University's) Hospital, Rosser said.

"If I can do that in Ecuador," he said of the medical mobile that won a prestigious Smithsonian Award, "I can do that in the Mississippi Delta; I can do that in the north hills of Mississippi."

During his presentation, Rosser also showed a video of Operation Beating Heart, developed last summer after a young football player dropped dead of a heart attack.  Rosser, a former football player, said he wept when he heard about the death that might have been prevented if the young boy's heart problem had been detected earlier.

He set out to design a program to inexpensively screen for heart problems and other diseases that could potentially become fatal.  Using a $25,000, five-pound electro-cardiograph developed by NASA, and hand-held computers, health care professionals performed electrocardiograms (heart exams) and did blood tests on inner-city athletes.

Results showed that 20 percent of the athletes had non-exertional asthma, particularly critical information because the kids being screened were mostly African-American, and are 20 times more likely to die of asthma than the rest of the population.  The screening also revealed symptoms of diabetes and hypertension.

"We found out when you look," Rosser said, "you find a lot of time bombs."

Progressive, creative thinking and money invested on the front end are required to make telemedicine work, Rosser said.  But the benefits are reflected in the number of lives that can be saved, and the amount of money that will not have to be spent treating long-term illnesses and their complications because problems will be caught early.

Telemedicine has the added socio-economic benefits of employing some of those very people who are disenfranchised, and distrust the medical establishment as "cyberspace health care technicians," who will help form the front lines of this medical revolution, says Rosser.

Rosser, who directs Yale's Endo-Laparoscopic Center, said he believes Mississippi is an ideal place to bring telemedicine crashing into an old medical and health care system in severe need of being redesigned in the image of the 21st century.  Many of the professionals attending the conference agreed.  Some of them cornered Rosser after his morning message, and invited him to do everything from teach classes via computer to attend forums to share the benefits of telemedicine with rest of the state.

Dr. Lovetta Brown, State Health Office for District One, which consists of nine counties in northwest Mississippi, was excited at the prospect of bringing telemedicine to help provide better health care to areas with too few resources, and a surge in the number of doctors leaving rural health care.

Brown said that organizations like community health centers and hospitals that provide primary care would seem the likely place to start.  Telemedicine could be used to provide home visits, checking on mothers and babies during the first year, and even screening homeless people.

My mind was racing a mile a minute," she said, "just thinking of all the things that could be done."

s
 
 
     

Contact Webmaster with questions or comments
Copyright © 2004 Advanced Medical Technology Institute