Virtual Health: A Story from Region 3

NNLM Discovery

When COVID-19 struck, one rural library in Texas made a bold move to help their community. They reached out to NNLM about funding opportunities for a virtual health room in Pottsboro, Texas. This had NEVER been done before, having an established room in a library dedicated to tele-health appointments. On this episode of the NNLM Discovery podcast, Region Three Executive Director Brian Leaf shares his story with host Yamila El-Khayat about how he and Jessica Rangel, Executive VP of Health Systems University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth, helped Pottsboro County Librarian Dianne Connery use an NNLM grant to establish a nationwide model to harness the power of telemedicine to overcome the lack of access to healthcare in much of rural America.
Building on the pilot’s success, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission has expanded this funding model for more libraries to implement similar telehealth spaces, including Austin Public Library.
You can view a short video about this story here on the NLM YouTube channel.
The NNLM is the outreach arm of the National Library of Medicine with the mission to advance the progress of medicine and improve the public health by providing all U.S. health professionals with equal access to biomedical information and improving the public's access to information to enable them to make informed decisions about their health. The seven Health Sciences Libraries function as the Regional Medical Library (RML) for their respective region, with Region Three consisting of: Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. To learn more about Region 3 visit: www.nnlm.gov/about/regions/region3
All of the artwork for this podcast series has been created with a generative AI text-to-image tool! The text prompt for the episode's artwork was “Telemedicine at the library in Texas impressionism.”

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