TABLE OF CONTENTS Fourteen and one-half percent (14.5%) of our GNP is spent on health care. In spite of this, many of our citizens (especially in rural areas) do not have easy access to quality medical care. Providing cost-effective health care to patients in isolated or remote areas far from medical centers is both a national and a global concern. ACTS provided high-quality, wide bandwidth communication links to demonstrate telemedicine (i.e., remote medical diagnostics) and consultation. The capability of ACTS to use communication circuits ondemand has the potential of making telemedicine cost-effective.
Led by Dr. Bijoy Khandheria, physicians from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota conducted extensive telemedicine trials over ACTS [66, 67] between 1994 and 1996. In one phase, they used T1-VSATs to perform remote medical diagnosis and evaluation of patients in the Pine Ridge Indian Health Services Hospital on the Lakota reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The 45-bed Pine Ridge hospital provides health services to the reservation. The hospital had 15 positions for full-time primary care physicians and 87 nurses. Historically, it had been difficult to fill the 15 full-time positions, and physician turnover tended to be high. Because of the remote location of the reservation, consulting and continuing education services were difficult to obtain for the health care professionals at Pine Ridge. There are close to 2,500 hospitals with limited medical personnel like Pine Ridge Clinic that serve about 24% of the U.S. population. T1-VSAT service provided Mayo physicians in Rochester, Minnesota, with real-time voice,...
