Nearly $1 million is on the way to Med Center Health to cover an expansion of the organization’s telehealth services, something Eric Hagan, vice president of Rural Hospitals, said has grown “exponentially” in use since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It opens up a whole lot of new opportunities for us,” Hagan said.

The $992,780 grant will go toward the purchase of two-way audio-visual equipment that will be installed at a central hub location and in rural health sites in Allen, Clinton, Hart, Simpson and Warren counties. With a 15% match from MCH, over 18,000 patients will benefit.

Telehealth and similar services have been available since 2007, Hagan said. When it started, around 20 telehealth visits per year were done. Now, that number has grown to several thousand per year.

“When you think about almost 400,000 people in this area … sometimes we’re challenged with enough space to take care of them all here in Bowling Green,” Hagan said. “We want to have the ability to take care of them closer to home.”

Hagan said the new technology will also allow for an expansion of services in rural areas, allowing higher levels of care to reach more people.

He said other health systems utilize what’s known as “virtual hospitals” and “virtual nursing” already, practices he said that will allow MCH to better manage the ongoing shortage of nurses and physicians.

“I think there’s been a significant decline both in physicians and nurses and other health care providers,” Hagan said. “So this will give us the ability to augment some of that with where those resources are.”

No staffing increases are expected with the rollout. Hagan said the equipment will allow MCH to “do more with less,” allowing potentially one nurse to provide services to several different hospitals.

Hagan said a timeline on the rollout is not set, but said the spring of 2025 is a “best guess.” He said while MCH would have been able to accomplish this without the grant, it would have been more difficult, given rising costs for health care systems.

“I think our commitment to investing in our people, our technology and our services, I think this is just another example of that,” he said. “So it’s not a matter of if we would have done this project, it’s a matter of when we would have been able to do this.”

The grant came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which dispersed over $5.5 million in Distance Learning & Telemedicine Grants to eight recipients across Kentucky.

Four of the recipients were health care entities like Med Center, the others were awarded to school systems in Henry, Monroe, Trimble and Webster counties.

According to a Med Center release, more than 27,000 Kentuckians will receive health care improvements and over 12,000 rural students and educators will see improvements in distance learning connections.