Ann Fronczek | Source | Associate Professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York
Ann Fronczek
Ann Fronczek joined the faculty of the Decker School of Nursing in 1999. She is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the PhD Program. Her area of teaching and clinical expertise is telehealth education. curriculum development and implementation, course development, education technology and leadership in nursing education.
Fronczek's past teaching experiences have been across clinical courses in the undergraduate, pre-licensure programs. She serves as mentor to undergraduate students in an honors program, graduate nurse educator students and PhD students.
Fronzcek's current research and scholarship work is in the area of telehealth. She is the co-project director for the Southern Tier Telehealth Center that established an infrastructure at Binghamton University to foster research, mobile health development, and training in the area of telehealth in collaboration with the Watson College. She is particularly engaged in the development of the training center for telehealth and developing a nursing program of research for this project. This developing infrastructure was created with the idea to create a strong workforce that would utilize telehealth technologies for research, education, and practice across nursing specialties.
She is co-project director of the Rural Telehealth Educational Consortium and a member of the New York State Telehealth Advisory Group .
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Binghamton University, State University of New York
Associate Professor
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Binghamton Faculty Focus - Using Telehealth to Increase Access to Underserved Populations
Ann Fronczek is an associate professor at the Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences and the director of the Ph.D. program. Fronczek specializes in educational and research initiatives into Telehealth and mHealth services, which can provide much-needed care for underserved and rural populations. Her advocacy for incorporating these technologies has gained increased adoption among healthcare professionals with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty Profile: https://www.binghamton.edu/decker/research/profile.html?id=fronczek See more Faculty Focus Videos: https://www.binghamton.edu/communications-and-marketing/media-public-relations/faculty-focus.html http://www.binghamton.edu
Article
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The accelerated closures of rural facilities across the country are an alarming trend. Closure of healthcare facilities eliminates choices for care for entire rural communities who already experience issues of time to travel to care, distance to care (especially specialty care), geographic and weather challenges, etc.
Telehealth and virtual care technologies are becoming an important element in providing health care to clients by nurses and other healthcare professionals, and have become a necessity for rural healthcare providers and organizations. Telehealth provides a unique opportunity for healthcare providers to engage with rural communities in unique ways, but it is not without challenges. Approximately 25% of rural communities throughout the country are without access to broadband internet, a necessity for most telehealth technologies to work despite funding and interventions by the federal government. Cellular service is also a challenge, leaving most mobile devices that could be used to facilitate care as a non-option. Healthcare providers and legislatures need to continue to work on infrastructure support.
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Telehealth is not a replacement for in-person care. I don't ever put that sort of bias out there. But it is another way of reaching very difficult access populations. And we need to really consider it as we're entering a world of a two-channel health system, where we have the traditional, in-person care. But then we're also always going to have the Telehealth avenue available to us.
