Southern Missouri Telehealth Genetics Service
Southern Missouri Telehealth Genetics Service (Columbia, MO) is an outreach program of the Division of Medical Genetics at the University of Missouri Health Care. The goal of SMTGS is to improve the health of individuals and families by providing patient-centered, community-based medical genetics evaluations, counseling services, and educational opportunities to benefit families in rural Missouri. The University of Missouri Healthcare and SMTGS will partner together to distribute Does it Run in the Family? pamphlets to families in rural southern Missouri.
Southern Missouri Telehealth administers one face-to-face clinic in Springfield, with underwriting by a local hospital. In 2005, funding through the Heartland Regional Genetics Collaborative initiated the Southern Missouri Telehealth Genetics Service (SMTGS). The University of Missouri’s Telehealth Program and cooperating sites in southern Missouri collaborated with SMTGS to establish three telehealth remote clinics, conducted by live video conferencing, in Springfield, West Plains, and Poplar Bluff, Missouri.
Patients meet the coordinator or counselor at the remote site, and the Geneticist is located at the University site. Appointments are conducted through a secure telemedicine system. The Telehealth clinic is successful and continues with funding provided by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
Data from the Missouri Department of Health Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) show that residents of southern Missouri are more likely to smoke and be obese and less likely to exercise. Women ages 18-44 are less likely to know that folic acid is used to prevent birth defects.
The genetics outreach programs will incorporate the Does it Run in the Family? toolkit into the programs in southern Missouri. They see approximately 50-100 patients per year in the Telehealth clinic and approximately 205 patients face-to-face in the Springfield clinic each year. In addition, the genetic counselor and service coordinator attend health fairs, inter-agency meetings, and parent education forums throughout southern Missouri. Both the clinical and educational sites will be used for distribution of the Community Centered Family Health History tools.
SMTGS seeks to target the diverse communities in rural southern Missouri with the Does it Run in the Family? toolkit by:
- Customizing the toolkit to target rural Missourians and cover the multifactor conditions most common in southern Missouri, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
- The toolkit will be designed to encourage adults to talk about their health history with family members and health care providers and to lead to healthy lifestyle choices.
- Meeting with partner groups to explain the importance of pamphlets and show how they can design it to best meet their specifics group's needs.
- Distributing and explaining the toolkit at inter-agency meetings, educational forums, and health fairs throughout southern Missouri and giving them information on the toolkit.
- Distributing the toolkit at Genetics Outreach Clinics in southern Missouri.
- Distributing the toolkit through established systems of innovative partner groups at annual events or special projects that target a diverse group of families.
By partnering with local providers of health and education, SMTGS will be able to distribute the Does It Run in the Family? brochures to each region of southern Missouri.
