The University of Hawaii at Manoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM), the UH School of Social Sciences and the Alaska Federal Health Care Partnership (AFHCP) on Wednesday signed an agreement to jointly develop and field telehealth technology throughout the Pacific region.
As part of this, JABSOM’s ten year old Telehealth Research Institute will use its recently funded three-year, $980,000 grant from the Federal Health Resources and Services Administration to establish the Pacific Basin Telehealth Resource Center. Both states have similar challenges in health care and have cooperated on programs previously. Sven-Erik Bursell, director of the Diabetes Telehealth Program within the Telehealth Research Institute: “They both have remote, rural settings that make it a challenge to deliver health care, and native peoples who suffer from disproportionately higher rates of serious illness including metabolic disorders such as diabetes.” UH release