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New Mexico Corrections Department Adopts Telemedicine Platform

Department reduces cost, enhances treatment for seven-facility network.

SANTA FE, N.M. -- The New Mexico Corrections Department. wanted a way to improve medical treatment for inmates while also trimming costs.

The department has implemented MedReach telemedicine software, specifically designed to manage physician-patient encounters over Internet protocol (IP) networks.

The department chose the software to provide comprehensive health-care services to inmates in seven facilities under the department's jurisdiction, including both public and privately owned and operated facilities that house the department's inmates.

The software provides the department with enterprise-wide, multimedia distance medicine applications that more efficiently provide care to inmates within its community of facilities and integrates remote diagnostic medical devices to enable the remote examination, diagnosis and treatment of patients by physicians when direct face-to-face interaction is inconvenient, inefficient or ineffective.

Currently, the MedReach network enables inmates at Santa Rosa, N.M., to receive psychiatric counseling via video teleconferencing from specialists in Illinois. Also, the Corrections Department, in conjunction with the Center for Telehealth at the University of New Mexico Medical School, is uses the software to conduct training on treatment plans for Hepatitis C for its clinical staff and physicians at all of the department's facilities. Both programs save the department significant travel time while maintaining quality of care.
Miriam Jones is a former chief copy editor of Government Technology, Governing, Public CIO and Emergency Management magazines.