LAS CRUCES – The school-based health center (SBHC) at Las Cruces High School has the
only mobile medical cart of its kind in the state of New Mexico. The unit, which includes a
computer, a camera and diagnostic equipment, allows the school’s nursing staff to provide health care to students so the students don’t have to miss school, and, sometimes, so
they won’t have to make trips to doctor’s offices or emergency rooms, said Linda Summers, Ph.D., director of the Southern New Mexico Adolescent and Young Adult
Health Consortium.

The Mobile Medical Cart II, nicknamed “SeeMore,” is equipped with a camera that sees better than the human eye and allows LCHS school nurse Sandy Peugh and health assistant Marina Travis to share live video of a student they are treating with medical staff across town or across the state.

“It's an exciting time at LCHS with the new telemedicine project. Using ‘SeeMore’ provides myself and other health care providers a more clear and detailed idea of what may be going on with the student and enables us to provide a much more effective way of either treating or referring the student to the proper place,” said Peugh.

LCPS has joined with the Gadsden Independent School District, the New Mexico Department of Health, Memorial Medical Center’s (MMC) family medicine residency program and others to form “ConnecXions: Linking Adolescent Health Care Services through Telemedicine.”

The medical professionals on the receiving end of the audio and video generated by SeeMore are likely to be Dr. Rick Rubio, a family doctor, and Lucy Sandoval, a psychologist, at Gadsden Middle School; or Dr. Kathleen Hales and Dr. Bert Garrett, director of the residency program and adolescent services at MMC. ConnecXions also includes La Clinica de Familia, which provides dental services; Ben Archer Clinic; and the Healthcare Foundation of Southern New Mexico, which is the consortium’s fiscal agent.

The staff at the middle school or at MMC can direct the movement of the camera to see into and photograph remotely a patient’s ears, nose or throat; to treat an ailment like strep throat or laryngitis; or to get a closer view of a skin condition. The photos and related information can be stored and forwarded to be studied at a later time or archived or so staff can consult with a dermatologist or other specialist on the student’s condition. And, SeeMore has its own stethoscope and headphones, so the doctor can remotely listen to and store the patient’s heart sounds and breathing.

The LCHS medical staff still have personal, face-to-face contact with the students they are treating, and they seek parental consent before providing tele-medical evaluations of students. Parents are even invited to the school to sit in on evaluations.

If a student exhibits any abdominal pain or other symptoms of serious illness or injury during an evaluation, he or she, as before SeeMore’s introduction, still is sent to a doctor or hospital for treatment.

The tele-medicine consortium will soon have a second mobile medical cart, when SeeMore Two arrives at the brand new Chaparral High School, also part of GISD. “Our goal is to have the south (southern New Mexico) take care of the south,” said Summers.

SeeMore also can be used by school medical staff and trainers to conduct student sports physicals, and may even be useful in providing mental health services.

“Teenagers trust systems like this,” said Summers. Because most students routinely use websites like myspace.com, cell phones and other systems and program that use remote communications, they “are not resistant to talking to someone via tele-medicine,” said Summers.

The original SeeMore was purchased from Second Opinion Software, LLC, based in Torrance, California through a private-public venture. SeeMore Two in Chaparral is being paid for by a grant from the Community Foundation of New Mexico, based in Albuquerque.

Before buying SeeMore, Summers and consortium partners MMC Chief of Residency Dr. Ahuja Abhishek, the LCHS SBHC’s program coordinator for adolescent services Charlotte Pacheco visited a school nurse in Hart, Texas, a small town near Lubbock, this summer to see a tele-medicine unit in operation. They also attended a national tele-medicine conference in Nashville.

SeeMore arrived in Las Cruces in late August and had a public demonstration August 30. In early September, a wall in the LCHS SBHC was painted blue, because that’s the best background color for tele-medicine transmissions.

Contact Summers at 505.528.6006 or lindac.summers@state.nm.us. Contact Peugh at 527.9400 or speugh@lcps.k12.nm.us.