Rashid Bashshur is Director of Telemedicine at the University of Michigan Health System and Emeritus Professor of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Since the early 1970's, he has been a catalyst for the development and evaluation of telemedicine systems in the U.S. While at the National Academy of Sciences (Institute of Medicine), he was consultant to the Office of Economic Opportunity on the use of telecommunications to support rural applications at the RANN Program (Resarch APplied to National Need) of the National Science Foundation. The NSF awarded him a grant to evaluate a telemedicine program in rural Maine and to access the status of telemedicine nationwide. He organized the first two national conferences on telemedicine, whose proceeds where published as Telemedicine: Exploration in the Use of Telecommunications in Health Care.Over the past two and a half decades, Dr. Bashshur has served as senior consultant to numerous telemedicine projects, agencies and governments. He is the founder of the Nation Consortium for Telemedicine Evaluation, based at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. |