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Home arrow Health & Medicine arrow UNC broadband network health project gets Golden LEAF Foundation funding
UNC broadband network health project gets Golden LEAF Foundation funding E-mail
Friday, October 23, 2009

The Golden LEAF Foundation has awarded the North Carolina Institute for Public Health a $100,000 grant to support the NC Telehealth Network project.

The institute is the service and outreach arm of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.

The project will establish a dedicated high-speed broadband network connecting the state’s health-care providers. The network is being developed in three stages — health departments and free clinics in phase I; public non-profit hospitals during phase II; and private health-care providers in phase III.

The Golden LEAF grant will go toward phase II funding, to assess and qualify public non-profit hospitals to receive $6.1 million from an earlier Federal Communications Commission award. These funds will cover 85 percent of the subscription costs of hospitals’ network connections and services.

John Graham, Ph.D., project coordinator and the institute’s deputy director, said that with the completion of Phase II, virtually every rural and underserved community that depends on one of the state’s 104 public community hospitals would  benefit.

“Ultimately this system will save lives,” Graham said. “The network will enable the adoption of instructional and medical technologies that will improve medical care. Examples of these technologies include multimedia medical education tools, Web-based electronic health records and health information exchanges, and high-resolution medical image transmission.”

Graham said the broadband network positions public non-profit hospitals to secure federal stimulus funding as early adopters of electronic health records and should help create both telecommunications and health-care jobs.

The institute is currently completing phase I and developing the project proposal for phase III.

For more information, Graham can be reached at (919) 966-8450 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, (919) 966-7467, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it