Abstract
The long summer with heat and storm has ended in the Northern Hemisphere and universities around the world are back in session. That means for us above the equator cool weather, brilliant colored leaves as the chlorophyll gives way to red and gold of anthrocyanins and carotene. Young people are off to study and preparing for lives only partially predicted and yet associated with great excitement and anticipation. They have as role models everything that pop culture, social media, and harried parents can summon and still are optimistic! They even expect more than a little fun along the way. Junior faculty are fully engaged in their elastic pursuits with varying endorsement from their mentors. Graduate students and fellows work with fevered minds to solve the big problems and look to joining academia for good or finding an appropriate fate in sound commerce. Mature faculty are plowing away at their careers with the hope that a graduate student or fellow might make life really interesting for another few years by having a good idea. All hope to inspire, and above all succeed in creating some quanta of knowledge that will serve them, their community, and society well. They might even become famous! Senior faculty are trying to be statesmanlike in their leadership and stewardship of the academic enterprise and older faculty are trying to be wise and look forward to dignified retirement. All are held together by the great questions of their chosen disciplines and the curriculum where they share teaching, learning, and the massive exchange of information that has made academics work for the last several millennia.
So, where is the telemedicine community in this new academic year? A quick look with an Internet search engine request for telemedicine degrees will lead you to worthy programs in the United States, Spain, India, South Africa, and Norway. The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) continues to evaluate and validate programs of telemedicine instruction at various United States universities and telemedicine programs. In the standard curriculum of health science programs, you may not find a course devoted only to telemedicine. However, it is without doubt that every health worker in the world is being trained in a program that at least knows that practitioners must be effective information managers and familiar with distant resources. In the developed world, every health student is to be computer literate and well prepared to work in the information continuum of dynamic patient management and an environment rich in information resources. The graduates will be lifelong learners riding the wave of advancement in evidence-based practice. In the developing world, information and communication resources are recognized attributes of an effective health system and essential to the future of healthcare. In one form or another, basic telemedicine is an aspiration at the least.
But are there any funds for academics in telemedicine? Yes! There are opportunities regularly followed and posted by the ATA. The National Library of Medicine, the Department of the U.S. Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center programs, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Institutes of Health are all viable even in these troubled times for funding in the United States. Special opportunities for funding can be very strong and ongoing funding through various agencies and foundations is actually abundant. Now you must read the request and find your niche, but in the general area of telemedicine the niche is not likely to collapse in the near term. In fact funding for worthwhile research has not been more varied and better. As an investigator you will, however, have to be nimble! For colleagues in the international community, funding from agencies and governments are receiving more favorable attention than ever. The efforts of health ministries rely heavily on research by regional scholars to find the right formulation for healthcare delivery. Foundations and international agencies are keen to find the right proposal to advance health management and telemedicine is now well recognized as clever route to success. Many international sources are very generous in support of new engineering technology that will lead to perhaps economic success for the technology part of a national economy.
Is there really such a thing as a career in telemedicine in academics? But of course! We are as always engaged in the name game of what is telemedicine. However, if you are interested in the use of information science and telecommunications to facilitate healthcare at a distance (ahem, the definition of telemedicine), call it what you wish and there is a career ahead. You may come to telemedicine from nursing, allied health, medicine, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, economics, or basic education and find a camaraderie of the first order in telemedicine with a lifelong prospect of continued discovery and contribution. Well, that is a career, is it not? A scientific or scholarly discipline may be defined as a coherent set of questions, a recognized body of knowledge, and a community of those who pursue the questions and profess the special knowledge. Telemedicine is a discipline with a rich set of questions as to human interaction, sensing, image processing, information processing, robotics, systems of practice, and a striving for a more profound understanding of the human state in health and disease as captured and transmitted and processed by information science and telecommunications. Telemedicine has a body of knowledge and a growing repository of evidence to enhance medical practice. Telemedicine has a community of investigators, teachers, and practitioners in a great variety of primary specialties. The community interacts, critiques, reviews, validates, and modulates the orthodoxy in our practices. Telemedicine offers a career in a vibrant discipline.
It is school time! If your school is not offering all you could wish as a student in information management and telecommunications, please be a brave student and inquire as to why! Start an interest group in your school. Can you not find a role model in telemedicine? Ask your benevolent dean to recruit one. If you are a graduate student or fellow and do not find all the mentoring and encouragement you feel you need and want to pursue telemedicine, ask someone for help. You might need to move but in the growing world of telemedicine you will not have to move very far! If you are a young academic, look for mentoring and get started. If you are mid-career, do not get discouraged. Look for advice and demand opportunities to test, discover, and grow in telemedicine. If you are teaching, where is telemedicine in the areas you teach? What is the status of the curriculum? If you are a senior faculty member, how about a plan for leadership and stewardship?
Let us go into this school year asking the hard questions in our discipline and expecting the environments and opportunities to do our creative work with great excitement as investigators, learners, and teachers.