Texas Tech hopes to secure funding for telehealth programs during 88th legislative session

LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) - With Texas’ 88th legislative session underway, Chancellor Tedd Mitchell and Texas Tech HSC President Lori Rice-Spearman spoke at a university town hall meeting about how the university could benefit from the more than $30 billion surplus.

Rice-Spearman says the university wants to secure funding to expand telehealth in rural areas

“It is our primary ask going into this legislative session,” Rice-Spearman said.

Rice-Spearman says the Texas Tech System wants to do that by building hubs that operate through university campuses.

“That’s a little bit of a different model than what others are proposing through telehealth,” Rice-Spearman said. “Telehealth has typically been used to pull health care away from a community and back to a major center. We’re gonna flip the model.”

The university hopes to do that by working with critical access hospitals and clinics in rural areas to keep patients and physicians in small towns across the state.

A similar pilot program is already in place in Amarillo. It allowed the university to send a general surgeon to the Hereford community giving more options for treatment there.

“He’s doing surgery, that family is able to stay there in Herford, get the care they need and then we monitor them post-surgery through telehealth,” Rice-Spearman said.

It’s just one way the university is working to flip the script in the health care industry.

“These are examples of some of the solutions we’re coming up with around our vision statement,” Rice-Spearman said. “To transform health care through innovation and collaboration.”

Other priorities include everything from mental health services to commercial aviation.

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