Truckee hospital partners with UC Davis School of Medicine

Since its inception in 2009, the UC Davis School of Medicine partnership with Tahoe Forest Health System for the university’s Rural-PRIME program continues to grow strong. To date, 16 UCD medical students have furthered their training at the Truckee facility with 11 students scheduled for the 2011 program.

Tahoe Forest was selected as the first clerkship-training site beyond Sacramento for this medical program in January 2010. UC Davis officially named Tahoe Forest its first Rural Center of Excellence.

Tahoe Forest Health System physicians train UC Davis medical students in the Rural-PRIME Program, which is designed to help increase health care access in California’s rural areas. Tahoe Forest Hospital offers medical students the opportunity to choose from a large spectrum of exceptional health care providers who have come from all over the nation, allowing for students to receive top-notch training in a rural clinical site rather than at an urban hospital. The result, according to research from rural medical programs around the nation, is more involvement with procedures and the real-world challenges for doctors who don’t have a legion of specialists at their disposal — like medical students at university health centers do.

While working with TFHS medical professionals, Rural-PRIME students receive extensive hands-on training in the use of telemedicine and simulation technology. Internationally recognized for its telemedicine program, UC Davis School of Medicine has incorporated this expertise into the Rural-PRIME program. Telemedicine is the diagnosis and treatment of patients in remote areas using video conferencing and medical information transmitted from another urban location, like Sacramento or San Francisco. In this case, information is transmitted from medical instructors at UC Davis to TFHS physicians and their visiting medical students. The use of telemedicine has been shown to improve access to specialty care in rural areas statewide and provides a valuable tool for training future rural physicians.