By Susan D. Hall
Fire Health IT
BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana is expanding its use of telemedicine to treat inmates in an attempt to improve care while facing budget challenges.
The LSU Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge, where many state inmates had been sent for care, closed in April as the state turned operation of its safety net facilities over to private operators in an effort to avoid severe budget cuts.
“We have completely redesigned the health care system in the Department of Corrections,” Deputy Warden Seth Smith at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center at St. Gabriel, told The Advocate. “We have brought specialists to the offender, where physicians physically come here... We do telemedicine for specialists we don’t bring on-site.”
The state has been using telemedicine at prisons since 1997 when it began offering access to specialists in pulmonary, orthopedics, diabetic and dermatology clinics. Today it offers 17 different clinics, including ear, nose and throat, urology, neurology, gastroenterology, HIV and Hepatitis C.
Full story: Louisiana expands telemedicine for inmate care