NC prisons expand telehealth for inmates, which officials say will make communities safer
The North Carolina Department of Public Safety has received a $900,000 federal grant to bring telehealth technology to rural prisons.
State officials called the program a revolution in health care for inmates that will also make communities safer.
“The telehealth initiative will allow us to connect that offender with a provider, a specialist, a primary care provider in order to address his or her medical needs that may have never been addressed before,” DPS Director of Healthcare Administration Terri Catlett said Thursday.
DPS officials said that prisoners used to have to be taken outside of facilities and into communities to get treatment, taking officers away from their posts, costing the prison for transport and treatment and creating the potential for an escape or violence.
“One of the most dangerous things we do is to escort an offender into the community,” Catlett said. “So, we protect the public by doing so.”
With telehealth, inmates could meet with providers located anywhere, thanks to a monitor that would allow doctors to use high-tech digital scopes to check a patient’s symptoms from hundreds of miles away.
“It really is an efficient way for our providers now to see more patients, evaluate patients [and] provide the care that’s necessary instead of spending so much time on the road traveling back and forth,” Catlett said.
The telehealth program was in the works before the coronavirus pandemic, but the increased need for remote interactions over the past year and a half sped up the rollout, officials said.
DPS has offered digital psychiatric treatment in prisons since 2012 – a program that’s saved taxpayers more than $3 million, according to the department.
Program architects said North Carolina now has the only completely state-run prison telehealth system in the country.
“If you think about where we were 16 months ago and where we are now, it really has become quite a success story,” Catlett said.
One unit of the telehealth system has already been installed for specialist visits in every North Carolina prison. With the grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the state will expand the system’s capacity to give every inmate in the state virtual access to a primary care doctor by early next year, she said.
