Building an Internet Bridge - Part 5 - Community Wellness and Health

Building an Internet Bridge – Part 5

Community Wellness, what does your Community Internet Network have to do with community health and wellness?

An Important part of the RAIN Network is our Central California Telemedicine Network. The Network coordinates Telemedicine Services to rural communities and low income urban areas not currently receiving regular Clinic or telemedicine services.

From the earliest days of our Community Internet projects, when the influence of the old BBS approach was still strong, there has been an organic understanding that one of the purposes of this new technology is to improve the quality of peoples lives, starting with improved Health and Wellness information access along with improved use of telemedicine as a means to ensure low income, seniior and family health care is always there, no matter how rural or how inner city.

RAIN Network’s highly innovative Rural Community Telemedicine Project puts its focus on the preparation of an effective Community and Neighborhood level Health Resource, with a strong focus on Health Information for schools, families, seniors and migrant farm workers. Special work on emerency preparation at the Community Level (for issues such as an avian flu pandemic) makes RAIN’s Rural Community Health Education and Telemedicine program very important. We work to establish a distance education program designed for K-12 Schools which will ensure access to vital school information as well as daily learning resources for student and family use in the event of school closures. The RAIN Telemedicine Network links over 24 clinics together and gives everyone in the community a better way to access health resources, wellness video and learning materials and much more.

RAIN Network’s Central California Rural Health Care Network has developed a Rural Health GIS maping system. The GIS system has been used to map clinics, public housing, schools and rural community information during 5 USDA funded telemedicine and distance learning grant projects and is designed to make use of new API’s and media interface tools which create a highly innovative, interactive GIS data system allowing physicians, nurses and other rural health care professionals to make real-time updates to the GIS data-sets from rural locations as well as to gather information. Most importantly, because “community” level use has been central to our GIS planning we have development GIS mapping systems which permit regular end user input, so rural community residents or community residents can input data for specific mapping projects. The GIS system has become a two way, highly interact tool.

We believe the preparation of a solid Telemedicine Application Framework which outlines methods to be used to coordinate Telemedicine applications and health information distribution to Rural Communities, including very rural seniors, farm and ranch workers and families is essential and projects completed by RAIN Internet provide excellent, working models which are easy to follow in setting up new rural and urban community Internet networks.