KO Telehealth Project presentation at NAHO in Ottawa in January
The conference was an incredible experience. There were hundreds of people involved in Aboriginal health from all over Canada. Between 30 and 50 attended my presentation.
I heard may good things about NAHO, that they were accomplishing a lot in a short time, and that it was seen as a dynamic, highly functional organization. Valerie Gideon, who was working as a Health Information Policy Analyst in the Policy & Research Unit within the organization (informatics, telehealth, FNHIS, etc) has been recently promoted to Director of the Aboriginal stream within the organization. She is very excited about our project and is promoting it as a "success" story.
We also had some adventures connecting to North Spirit Lake for the demonstration portion of my presentation. The technicians there did not have a 3 port NT1 device to be able to use the 3 ISDN lines. So we were only able to connect at 128kbps. The image was okay for the presentation as long as there was little movement (tough with the young person). The sound transmission was good.
Julie and her grandson in North Spirit Lake did a great job of showing how telehealth was benefiting her community. Audience participants came to me and told me that it was very grounding to see what accessing services can be like at a community level.