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The Southern Sierra Telehealth Network (SSTN) was founded with a grant from the California Telemedicine & E-health Center in 2000. It now has a fully self-supporting telemedicine network that includes ten rural clinics, hospitals and medical centers, as well as many individual consultant providers, and provides specialist telemedicine services for cardiology, medicine, psychiatry (adult, pediatric, geriatric), pulmonology, radiology, dermatology and developmentally disabled patients. Our network performed over 1700 interactive video telemedicine visits in 2008 and we expect to do more than 2000 this year. The SSTN was established at Ridgecrest Regional Hospital (RRH) which is located in the isolated high desert of California east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The telemedicine network was founded and other tele-education (e-health) and health information technologies (HIT) were implemented to meet the many unmet health care needs resulting from the lack of critical medical specialists and sub-specialists within 80 miles of our community. Building our Network in a remote community and connecting to more rural sites, as well as consultant sites in larger urban areas, has given us unique experience and expertise in implementing innovative telemedicine, telehealth and HIT in rural communities. |
