Sep 4, 2019
As NASA and the nation celebrate the 50thanniversary of the moon landing, Logan chats with Chuck Doarn about the impact of the space program on health care. Doarn currently serves as a special assistant to the NASA Chief Health and Medical Officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC; co-chair of FedTel for the federal government; and governance team lead on a NATO project called Multinational Telemedicine System for Disasters; and a research professor and the MPH Program Director in the Department of Environmental Health, Division of Public Health, at the University of Cincinnati. As the principal author of NASA's Integrated Strategic Plan for Telemedicine and as the lead for NASA’s Telemedicine activities, Doarn discusses, with first-hand knowledge, the development of robust remote medical care and the increasingly more affordable bandwidth capability for telemedicine. Doarn also talks about advances in telemedicine today as a result of Skylab and how state compacts now allow providers to practice medicine across state lines. But some old challenges, such as reimbursement and liability, still exist today, he notes. Doarn says that in telemedicine and other areas, the critical questions are whether we are fundamentally on the right track in integrating technology into our lives. And, the answer, he says, is “yes.”