Serving Through Telemedicine

Dr. George Rounds knew that Jaimie Smith, not her real name, age 12, needed special help. A primary care physician, Dr. Rounds said that his young patient displayed bizarre behavior at home and acted out in school.  Her birth mother had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and Jaimie now was in the care of an adoptive parent.  Dr. Rounds decided to act quickly. But his clinic, the Northland Medical Center in Bigfork, MN, pop. 469, did not have a specialist and Rounds knew that an appointment with one, ‘sometime in the future’ and a series of all-day round trips to the closest major city, Duluth, for mental health consults was not serving Jaimie well.

So Duluth came to Dr. George Rounds and to Jaimie.

Through the immediacy of video teleconferencing, Gary Davis, Ph.D. a licensed psychologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth campus, talked to Jaimie, diagnosed her problems and developed a treatment plan. Today Jaimie is back in school and, as Dr. Rounds said, “is doing dramatically well with relationships.”  

(Davis, on the television, demonstrates a video mental health consult with Tracy Kemp from the Department of Behavioral Sciences.)

With more than 30 years of experience, Dr. Davis heads the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the Medical School, Duluth, is the Associate Director of the school’s Center for Rural Mental Health Studies (CRMHS) and is presently serving as the Interim Senior Associate Dean of the Medical School – Duluth Campus.  Psychologists in the Center are developing new treatment strategies for rural communities. Rather than simply creating an "urban" care system in rural Minnesota, they are shaping a system of mental health care that fits the rural setting culturally, financially and geographically.