Christian Messa

Lufkin-based foundation pledges $750,000 to electronic medical record system

System will relay patient information from Regional Maternal and Child Health clinics to UTMB’s Galveston campus

GALVESTON, Texas — Nine years after making one of the first contributions to the development of the University of Texas Medical Branch’s telemedicine program, the T.L.L. Temple Foundation has now pledged $750,000 to help the university complete an electronic medical record system that will enhance the program’s ability to improve health care access for women and children.

UTMB’s telemedicine program is an advanced telecommunications system that allows the university’s health care professionals to provide medical consultations to patients hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The program features high-speed telephone lines and video cameras that provide two-way audio-video communication links between UTMB and clinics equipped with the technology.

Through telemedicine, nearly 100,000 women and children enrolled in UTMB’s Regional Maternal and Child Health Program can be treated by health care specialists not found in their communities. The 37 RMCH clinics located in East and South Texas provide vital health services, regardless of the patients’ ability to pay.

Most of the RMCH patients live near small towns and come from working-class families that lack insurance. Some of the women require such specialized care as nutritional and genetic consultation, as in the case of diabetic expectant mothers, and would have had to travel to UTMB’s Galveston campus before the advent of telemedicine technology. Telemedicine ensures that the women can receive essential prenatal specialty care by eliminating obstacles the patients often encountered when seeking such services: traveling hundreds of miles to Galveston, using unreliable transportation or economic hardship from missed workdays.

Thanks to the Temple Foundation’s commitment to help complete the RMCH electronic medical record system, the university’s faculty will be able to more efficiently care for their patients by promptly retrieving accurate treatment information and laboratory test results from the regional clinics. Such a system eliminates paper files, which can be lost and are time-consuming to transfer when RMCH patients have been referred to UTMB specialists. The electronic record system will also link the clinics and UTMB to community hospitals, where almost half of the academic health center’s prenatal care patients give birth.

Dr. Carolyn S. Nelson-Becker, administrative director of the RMCH program, said the Temple Foundation’s contribution will allow UTMB to complete the final phase of a vital health project. “The Temple Foundation is ensuring that our telemedicine program efficiently fills a crucial need to deliver health care for expectant mothers,” said Nelson-Becker, a UTMB obstetrics and gynecology faculty member. “With the proper prenatal care, many women with high-risk pregnancies can have successful, normal deliveries.”

Dr. Garland D. Anderson, professor and chairman of the UTMB Obstetrics and Gynecology Department and the Jennie Sealy Smith Distinguished Chair in Obstetrics and Gynecology, explained that women with high-risk pregnancies often would not show up for appointments in Galveston. “The electronic medical record system offers a better way for us to bring much-needed medical care to these patients and their unborn children.”

UTMB’s telemedicine program logs more visits than any other such program in the world. Since its inception in 1994, it has conducted more than 150,000 telemedicine consultations, more than four times the world’s second largest program. The technology has been applied to care for such diverse populations as federal, state and county inmates; seniors in rural areas of the state; epilepsy patients; East Texas children with chronic medical conditions; cruise ship passengers; and workers in Antarctica.

The Temple Foundation has been a staunch supporter of UTMB, committing nearly $2 million to the academic health center since 1995 to such projects as the Open Gates renovation and a collaborative nurse practitioner master’s education program. Open Gates, the 19th -century residence of Galveston business leader George Sealy, was adaptively restored into an advanced teleconference center that served as the focal point for UTMB’s evolving telemedicine program in the mid-1990s.

The T.L.L. Temple Foundation was established in 1962 by Georgie Temple Munz in honor of her father, sawmill and lumber magnate Thomas Lewis Latane Temple. Headquartered in Lufkin, the foundation is dedicated to enhancing the state’s quality of life, particularly for citizens living in deep East Texas. It has bestowed more than 3,000 grants totaling about $210 million, making it one of the country’s largest private philanthropies.

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