Telehealth retraining for IT workers in New Hampshire and Vermont proposed

Donna Cusano

The ‘Health and Wealth Care Initiative for Vermont and New Hampshire’ proposes retraining of more traditional IT workers to work in telehealth.  Examples given are training the elderly to use telehealth technologies (which seems to be linked to broadband access–not a necessity for many devices on the market, hmm) and (interestingly) transitioning these workers from wrestling with ‘older computer systems’ to ‘cloud’ used for the health IT in telehealth systems. Certainly creating some new jobs in healthcare for (presumably) older workers in working with seniors and updating skills at the same time is a worthy goal.  Partners are the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health Care System, NH Technical Institute and Arnett Development Group.  They are seeking $1.75 million in grants, including $750,000 in ARRA (Federal stimulus) funds, and could serve 5,000 patients.  (Of course the iPad is mentioned–one must to be au courant–but if the partners believe it can facilitate greater usage among elderly who have trouble with a keyboard, reports indicate that the iPad touch screen is a worse struggle.)  Article.