Partners

University of Iowa (UI)

RTRC is based in the Carver College of Medicine and connected to the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa (UI).  This alliance brings valued experience in rural health, health care delivery, and comparative effectiveness research to expand telehealth knowledge.  The UI team’s long history of telehealth research further enables investigators to focus on areas of health care, access, and sustainability.  As an RTRC partner, the UI team has been charged by the Office for the Advancement of Telehealth (OAT) to specialize in setting measures and collecting data across multiple OAT-funded grantee programs, then analyzing data and publishing manuscripts to advance telehealth.  The UI team also leads RTRC projects researching use of telehealth in chronic diseases, sepsis, and substance use disorder as well as during COVID-19.  Some of these projects have been in collaboration with the Veteran’s Health Administration. 

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC)

Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) are valuable partners associated with RTRC.  Their affiliation with The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, which has over 50 years of experience in rural health research, has positioned them well to investigate telehealth in the context of rural health care delivery. Some telehealth areas of interest pursued in collaboration with OAT are maternal health, behavioral health in critical access hospitals, and virtual nursing. The UNC team has particular expertise in mixed methods designs, qualitative methods, and geospatial analyses.  

University of Southern Maine (USM)

Researchers at University of Southern Maine (USM) working with RTRC specialize in quantitative analyses of data associated with the cost and use of rural health care services, and and qualitative evaluations of the barriers and facilitators for the use of telehealth. This expertise is valuable for projects developed in collaboration with OAT that involve Medicare, Medicaid, and other insurance programs and the impact among patients and providers in Critical Access Hospitals, Rural Health Clinics, Federally Qualified Health Centers. Topics of study have included school-based telehealth and telebehavioral health. The USM team utilizes faculty and staff resources at the Maine Rural Health Research Center when studying policy issues pertaining to health insurance, access to care, and delivery system challenges.