The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium provides health services to more than 120,000 beneficiaries in some of the most remote areas of the country. Many of the communities do not have specialists, physicians or even nurses. In order to increase access to health services, this Consortium will develop RAVEN – the Rural Alaska Video E-Health Network – a system that enables tribal health care facilities throughout the state to communicate with each other for clinical services, education, and administration.
RAVEN will take advantage of an existing telehealth network managed by the Consortium which connects most of the 204 tribally-managed hospitals and clinics throughout Alaska that constitute the Alaska Tribal Health System. These networks include the "leading edge" operations of the Maniilaw Association in the Kotzebue region and the network operated by Eastern Aleutian Tribes. Most of these facilities are only accessible by air, and patients often have to be flown to receive tertiary and specialty health services.
The focus of RAVEN is to provide appropriate management software and hardware to easily manage and schedule conferences that will increase access to health care services for rural Alaskans. Currently, videoconferencing has been used only to provide emergency medical care and continuing education. Most of this use has been experimental and only available to a few areas. This project will build a system that will allow multiple organizations to schedule conferences through an automated scheduling system.
