Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1996

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E-Mail Medicine
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STORY: Getting from one place to another is a big problem in a state as big as Alaska. Just seeing the doctor means flying to urban centers like Anchorage or Fairbanks. But if Fred Pearce, a professor of communications at the University of Alaska Anchorage, is right, computers and electronic mail will allow doctors to make cyberspace house calls.

PEARCE "Now, to fly someone from Stebbins, Alaska, to Fairbanks for a ten-minute dermatological exam is an expensive proposition. Could a dermatological image be moved electronically, can the diagnosis be made effectively, and is the patient and both the provider and the consultant satisfied such that everybody wins?"

Professor Pearce and a consortium of Alaska health care providers will try to answer these questions over the next two years. They've received a two million dollar federal grant to build a computer network connecting 20 Eskimo and Indian village health clinics with the Alaska Native Health Service hospital in Anchorage. The network will allow urban physicians to exchange patient records, photographs--even x-rays--instantly with health aides in remote villages. Professor Pearce says a technology as simple as e-mail may be just the tool to meet many routine health care needs.

Pearce: "Things like monitoring. Diabetes is becoming a more significant problem, especially in rural Alaska, and if you monitor diabetics and give them appropriate feedback, that would reduce the likelihood that the diabetic will need to be checked into the hospital."

Kathe Boucha-Roberts directs the telemedicine program at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. She says a computer network will save money because fewer patients will need to fly to urban centers for medical care. It may also speed the healing process.

Boucha-Roberts: "Sometimes healing doesn't take place when you are removed from your family and removed from your community, and so we hope that if we can keep people within their own community and bring the health care to them, that it not only is more affordable for the health care budget, whether it be a federal budget or a private sector budget, but also that the person can be in an environment where healing can take place faster."

Still, making trips to the city for routine health care has become so engrained in Alaska's rural society that giving it up will not be easy. The flights are paid for by the federal Indian Health Service, and many rural residents use the trips as way to combine a visit to the doctor with other business.

Boucha-Roberts: "There are people we've interviewed that said they didn't want to stay home, they like coming to Anchorage for health care because they get to go shopping or they get to see their relatives. And there are some physicians we talked to and they said no, they didn't want to use electronic systems, they wanted to travel."

No one expects electronic mail to eliminate the need for rural patients to fly to urban hospitals. But at a cost of several thousand dollars per person, Pearce and Boucha-Roberts both agree e-mail will reduce the number of medical flights and save money.

Reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska, this is Debra Damron for Arctic Science Journeys.