BROOKINGS – South Dakota State University’s College of Nursing has announced an agreement to use the CareSpan USA Inc.’s Virtual Clinic to train its students.
This agreement extends a January 2016 agreement between the two parties. South Dakota State uses the CareSpan platform in its nursing classrooms in Brookings, Rapid City and Sioux Falls. The college will start using CareSpan at its Aberdeen site in the spring 2020 semester. This partnership is the first of its kind. While CareSpan is in conversations with other colleges of nursing, SDSU is the only one currently using it for instructing students.
CareSpan’s virtual clinic integrates a patient-provider video telepresence and captures vital signs, medical images and heart/breathing sounds. It also allows e-prescribing, real-time specialist consultations, interactive patient education, informed consents and electronic health records.
“This agreement allows all of our students to learn and develop their skills using this innovative health-care delivery system,” said Mary Anne Krogh ’85/’11 Ph.D., the college’s dean. “We have seen the benefits of using the CareSpan platform as it was instrumental in our Healthcare Simulation Center receiving provisional accreditation by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare in teaching and education.”
The College of Nursing, in partnership with the College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions, will use the CareSpan platform on an opioid treatment study grant. Plans are in the works for the college to base a postgraduate digital health certification program utilizing the CareSpan platform as the teaching vehicle for nurse certification. Other ways to use the CareSpan platform are in discussion.
“We don’t think of the CareSpan ‘clinic-in-the-cloud’ as telehealth or telemedicine but as an integrated digital care delivery platform. As such, we believe that the CareSpan platform is ideally suited for nurse practitioners, graduate nurses and even undergraduate nurses to really become familiar with the emerging digital technologies that can transform health care in the 21st century,” said Dr. Terry Knapp, a board-certified surgeon and medical device and IT executive, who founded in CareSpan in 2010. “We look at this relationship as a public-private partnership aimed at improving medical care for all.”
The CareSpan technology will allow simulated patient exams to occur live among nursing students, patient assistants and instructors. Complete video screen captures of these simulated exams will allow students and instructors to review and discuss the care delivery methods and approaches using digital health technologies.
At first, CareSpan charged SDSU for its use of the CareSpan virtual clinic platform, but under the new agreement, CareSpan is making an in-kind donation of its platform to the College of Nursing for continuing education of the nursing leaders of tomorrow.
