In the post show we review the USDA DLT (Distance Learning and Telemedicine) grants slated to open in just a few weeks. This program will help rural communities get the technology they need to be more connected to experts in the fields of education and healthcare. Our panel will include: Philip Wolford, a two time grant winner and healthcare professional from KW2 Associates, Christopher LaPage, a grant writer who worked with over 17 USDA grant winners in 2016 and Rusty Hashemi from MDI a telemedicine cart manufacture.

Together our panel will discuss the latest technology trends in the telemedicine and distance learning industry. Our goal will be to guide viewers interested in applying for the 2017 USDA DLT grant with best practices and tips from experience.

You can schedule a USDA DLT Grant Strategy Meeting here: http://ptzoptics.com/landing/USDA.html

Learn more about Streaming Media in Healthcare

• USDA Distance Learning Technology Grants Tips here.
• PTZOptics Telemedicine Case Study in California Hospital here.
• VSee the telemedicine video conferencing software adds PTZ control support for PTZOptics
• here.Robotic Telemedicine Case Study with PTZOptics here.

2017 USDA Technology Grant Q&A
Paul Richards: Okay Tess, there is a lot of questions in there
Tess Protesto: Yes, we have a lot of relevant questions you want me to just start from the top and try to cover some of the questions
Paul Richards: I guess that’s the best way to do it.
Tess Protesto: Okay, Thomas Hendricks asks, “I do a lot of video production for a local hospital but I don’t want to work for the hospital. Could I apply for a grant or would I have to get the hospital department I work for to apply?”
Philip Wolford: I’ll dive into that one. I would say that it is best to have your hospital because probably non-profits be the lead applicant but you can partner with them and you could sub-out your services for that video production, now I would say that would probably be a valid expense in the narrative and Chris can probably verify that, as long as that technical service is being used to generate video for health care and education then it should be a valid expense inside of the application. Chris?
Chris LaPage: Yeah, that’s a great point. This particular program is actually a little bit more wide open than traditional grant programs they do allow some form of profits and things that nature but certainly it’s going to be driven typically the lead applicant has to be an organization for sure and no individuals and certainly a health care provider it’s going to be your typical go to scenario. This particular case seems like there would be more of a …this would happen to be a contract with the fund but do note that the primary purpose for these funds is actually get the equipment in place, so unlike other grants out there who won’t fund for the actual tele-medicine delivery, however just on the distance learning and the tele-health side, they do allow what they call “For capital asset acquisition” when it comes to learning software or tele-medicine pieces so there is a chance you can make the case for something like that, video production within that particular category which Is limited to 15% of the budget but do note that the bulk of the funding does have to be used on actual equipment and not for personal training and the other things you might see with a grant or other grant programs out there.
Tess Protesto: One more question. What would be the best resource to find a grants coming up and basically I’m not sure if he’s asking where should he go next after his done watching this stream.
Paul Richards: Yeah, because it sounds like this might be someone who is like “wow, this grants great but it’s going to open up in April and I only have 60days, they might feel like they might not be able to complete the entire processes” and can you also with that question talk about preparation and timeline, is it too late already I know it hasn’t open yet, it opens for 60 days, timeline wise and Philip I know you’ve done this a couple of time, what advice do you have for people who want to go after this grant.
Philip Wolford: Okay we did have a presentation on this, but very quickly I can go through some of the points, you want to start getting your partners together so you’re looking for …so things to consider for the USDA distance learning telemedicine grant. So knowing what site you will be participating with, knowing what we call a hubbin spoke model so you might not be in an urban center or a city and you want to help out, your rural partner hospitals, your rural clinics so getting everybody together in a meeting and saying “Okay we want to participate, give me your site address” and that will help determine your score which is stuff that Chris and I can help you with. Can you go to the next slide? Okay the RUS DLT like is said before is a match, they want to make sure that you’re putting in some money, a little skin in the game and now they have new rules, you can purchase equipment with 3 years of cloud service from a certified vendor. Zoom, [inaudible04:28] you know, Google. These are different types of vendors that have that ability to sell that cloud service and that allows you to get a lot of bigger bang for your buck over time. Focus on the narrative, what are you trying to achieve? So for example right now the USDA is not only doing a telemedicine and distance learning but they are really focuses a lot on giving money to organizations to stop the Opioid addiction, getting that word out you want to stay off of oxicarton and marijuana and those types of things so USDA is really putting forth a lot of effort into that. Also delivering mental health for veterans is a big addition for their [inaudible 04:50 – 04:53] America and allowing students connect for education and then our favorite tele-stroke services so people having strokes happen at the rural hospitals don’t have access to those world class neurologists they now do, so they can help save lives very quickly. So one of the things they are looking for is collaboration. When you start talking about this, maybe you get your partners together, you get your idea, you get your narrative, you built it. Now you’ve got to go and ask somebody in the IT department “Would you help me if I win this thing?” because you might not have the technology know how of how to get it out there hooked up and one of the last things you want to make sure of, or one of the first things is make sure that the C suite, you know your CEO, your CIO, maybe your CMO, Chief medical officer that the C suite is on-board because somebody is going to have to commit some money to that investment over all. That’s it. So that’s next advice coming up with those quick things to look for will help you determine whether or not you’re going to make it. Now I want to answer one more question though, you asked about additional funding resources, there is another organization called HRSA they run stuff all year long, Chris can help you with that as well, Chris writes HRSA grants one we’re concentrating on right now is USDA DLT, but HRSA is out there all year long.
Paul Richards: Very interesting. Okay how else are we doing with the questions?
Tess Protesto: Cory asked about a non-fire-fighters, he said will a training system for rural fire fighters qualify?
Chris LaPage: Yeah, when they talk about distance learning and the concepts of this grant there is a thing of teacher and students involved and when they are talking on telemedicine they are talking about actual telemedicine delivery, the delivery of care, so training particularly any kind of continual education things like those infact they could be secondary use cases in some cases but it wouldn’t be fundable directly now, talking about other grant programs, there is a grant program available in the fall, this is the fire fighter grant $350 million available, thousands of awards made every year and where there is a grants for outfits you know those trucks and also to do different type of regional collaboration project, certainly training will be a piece of that as well
Paul Richards: So when was that going to be opening?
Philip Wolford: Typically it opens in the fall within November, sometime between November and January but you typically see it open usually on the early side November and the late side January.
Paul Richards: Thank you for that, well we’ll have to keep in touch then as the major once are opening up we want to make sure we will like to be a resource,
Tess Protesto: yeah absolutely
Paul Richards: to keep people inform
Tess Protesto: Contact us we’ll love to work with you and see if this could work with you and see if this could work for your customer or your business.
Paul Richards: yes if we can keep in constant contact with you if you will and be able to deliver that information to our audience, bring you guys on to talk about it because I think talking through it and having the professionals on really helps people get prepared in advance which was the whole point of this. I think what I really want to do is for those of you out there, anyone who is interested, we want to figure out if you are the right candidate because if you are, then it’s worth setting up a strategy meeting and it’s worth meeting with Rusty, or Chris here or Philip and myself and our team, then it’s worth taking your time reaching out and doing all the steps, that where we want to be because we need to prepare in advance, those 60days could fly by so quickly just so quickly so that’s what we’re trying to do and let’s just keep the questions rolling, do we have any more or
Tess Protesto: Active shooter training program that is an interesting one.
Philip Wolford: Okay, so I can answer that one. So in the hospitals an active shooter program is education of what to do in events somebody shows up with a gun. Now there is all sorts of mannerisms for using this technology to educate all around the region so you could use, you could potentially write that with the narrative, that will be very innovative, that you’re going to be educating individuals in a region about active shooter so you probably have to make an argument for it.
Paul Richards: That’s a good one. Now let’s take that making that argument for it and just sauce that out a little bit more. So we’re talking about a hospital making an argument to create an education program that requires equipment to live streaming and broadcast the message or do distance learning with training.
Philip Wolford: Or you could have an entire school district, publicizing to every school using PTZOptics cameras into auditoriums educating children on how to combat an active shooter environment, so the school district, we just have this in [school name] Pennsylvania $440,000 was rewarded to educate the schools in the region, so it’s all about education and nothing to telemedicine so now you use that narrative, we’re going to educate all the children what to do if somebody shows up with a gun and rural schools, that’s distance learning in education narrative, that’s not a telemedicine narrative.
Tess Protesto: Yeah, that actually happens, my mom’s a teacher and they have that type of training.
Paul Richards: Very nice and they need equipment in other to make it more effective, it’s a shame it’s a ruby-11, and that’s the other thing exactly Philip, one of the main parts of it is let’s say you’re a rural school district and you don’t have anybody who is an expert on active shooter training the point is and you guys can kind of chime in here is that you create a relationship with a hospital or university that has an expert in the field and Chris if I’m understanding you correctly, they are not going to pay for you to hire those experts to pay them for their hours on time but they will pay for the video conferencing technology to enable you to go those reaches, is that correct?
Philip Wolford: That’s right yeah. So they are not paying for the person now. This is really for the start-up equipment. What I would know is that when you’re looking at this and Philip makes some great points here in terms of how you might approach it but that’s part of the consultation we can try and provide as well. If you have something like that going on, they might not be something you want to play up as a primary use cases again the key with this grant is 51% of the use for that equipment must qualify as distance learning of telemedicine delivery. So what you do with it the other 49% of the time, if you’re going to leverage it for active shooter education or other type of project that is absolutely A-Okay, but we’d want to consult with you on the specifics elements that you want to put to the fore front as the primary use cases and making sure they fit the definition of distance learning, tele medicine. For example personally with the fire department whereby it’s not a use case for training, if you have EMT’s whether it’s ambulance or firefighters whatever the case might be and they are actually leveraging equipment’s for example free hospital triage, leveraging video in that capacity that might be a version of telemedicine you can make as a primary use case and why the equipment was onsite you might use it for training and other purposes as long as we can make the case 51% of the time to me it’s the definition of distance learning and telemedicine.
Paul Richards: Wonderful. One quick thing I’ll throw in there and again give everybody sometime, we actually have a live give away that we do every single week and we almost forgot about it but we didn’t forget about you guys, here we go, this is the live give away it has ended there was 205 entries and just go over here and draw a winner and they have to be live in other to win so sometimes we have to withdraw a few times but we got Mark Euler and let’s just give him a moment to come up and we’ll go ahead and stick with our show. If Marks not here we’ll draw another winner.
Tess Protesto: Does any kind of equipment already purchases counts toward the 15% match for the grant?
Paul Richards: That’s an interesting question
Philip Wolford: So yes, it does.
Paul Richards: Really?
Philip Wolford: yes, that’s actually how we were able to start our program knowing that when we purchased our initial cameras that investment was seen as a match component and now according to some sources, investment in the cloud service as long as it’s done in a three-year bucket can also be used against your 15%
Chris LaPage: and if I could just add in there as well the way they are looking at it in the past couple of years is that in other for the debt to count against your match, you had to have made the purchase after the application deadline for that year so that’s just a quick note for folks so if opens and it’s 260days, if you’re purchasing before or during the application period but not the due day that’s the [15:28]. You want to purchase it after the due day for it to count
Paul Richards: Now after the due day of 2017 application or 2016?
Chris LaPage: note the year that you’re applying in that you’re trying to receive funding for. We had a made up deadline here of May 31st for this 2017 cycle, you put an application in and you submit an application as of June 1st of this year, any equipment you purchase will count toward the match if you were proof of funding later this year, it’s been out since the award has come towards December, towards the end of the year.
Philip Wolford: One other note on that, often times you hear that don’t rely on the grant to start a telemedicine program and that’s the message, because otherwise you might not get it started if you’re always waiting for money, it’s kind of like waiting for the lottery ticket but use the tools that you can to improve it, don’t just wait because you might not every get it into working
Paul Richards: Very good question, but this is not like playing the lottery, I think that with Chris here, he’s going to be able to give you …he has a whole validation process where his going to give a company a really good picture of whether or not they think it’s worth it right Chris?
Chris LaPage: that’s right, because its one of the few grant programs out there with objective scoring, 99% of grant program out there, reviewer review the application and almost all the scoring is subjective to that person’s opinion and how you’re meeting the review criteria in the case of this particular program, the objective criteria we can run this site through the [inaudible 17:11] they are very specific peculiar process that you want to make sure you do it right, get the numbers for that, the economic need based on the school lunch program, how much match you put up, what they call leverage factors in there as well, 15% is the minimum, but the more funds you put up the more points they actually give you for what they call leverage and then if you’re in areas with a health strike force areas as designated by the USDA or tribal jurisdictions are involved there’s bonus points in play, we can run all those numbers and we know if you need a certain threshold across those numbers, your chances are going to sky rocket in that regardless of how you do in the subjective part of the application, you’re going to stand a pretty good chance of funding and some of those subjective component, the need for services, how innovative the project is, one of them is cost effectiveness and certainly with PTZOptics and the folks here that’s going to be a key cost per site for example is going to be key metric, you look at evaluation criteria and folks are going to do quite well in my opinion in that particular piece when it comes to the scoring as well.
Paul Richards: Great, it seems like we’ve really done a good job of explaining everything, I’m sorry for showing everyone the inside of my tongue slash mouth there, that was a little bit over the top but we showed a more camera control, I think Patrick said I was dying but rusty, I want to give you a quick moment here before we wrap things up, I don’t think you really got to show us those mobile cases
Rusteen Hashemi: So let’s start with the big one that has a lot more features. This cases, the one right here, closed up it has a small sloppy handle and wheels at the bottom so it’s very easy to take from place to place but it does fit in overhead storage vent in airplane and when you open it up, so here we have at the top we have a web camera that is adjustable, here on the left side we have the battery meter, it tells you how much battery units you have left, this is lithium ion battery inside and it will do video conferencing for about 6 hours which is actually a very long time, there is other cases out there but majority of them will run maybe 2 to 3 hours max and if you’re taking your case and doing several home visits throughout the day then you might end up having to find an outlet inside somebodies house so as to charge your equipment off which is the best case scenario. So we have a 15.6inch touch screen and this is actually not a tablet, this is a whole i7 PC built inside of this case, so over here on this side we have the power switch and we have a cellular data plan switch, the cases come with Wi-Fi as a basis you can upgrade it to a 4G cellular plan so you always have connectivity this will also allow you to not have to get on some patients Wi-Fi in their house if you’re going on home visits as well, so we have a couple of input panel inputs on the side a display out, if you’re doing a presentation or if you’re in a clinic setting that has a small display on the wall you can have a second monitor showing x-rays or any results from like ECG test or something along those lines. Down here at the bottom, we have a 7 port USB hub which allows you to add 6 or 7 peripherals plugged in all the time somewhat you to be constantly plugging in peripherals you can run into some minor driver issues or some conflicts that may kind of make your consultation not run as smoothly as possible, so we have an echo cancelling speaker phone and also a watchable keyboard with a mouse pad on it the case is around weighing 27lb and this particular case does not have satellites data plan but there is an option to have an external cellular box that will Wi-Fi connect into this case.
Paul Richards: and the prices of this cases, are we getting any question on the chat on that?
Rusteen Hashemi: so the Large case NSRP is between $15,000 and that does not include the medical peripherals, but the lite version which is the smaller version is much more affordable MSRP is around $5,000 and that includes the service peripherals for the unit. This one is an i7 or i5 verges on the 15inch tablet as well and between both size affordable kits there is an ability to custom pick your peripherals and have a custom [inaudible 23:03] to go along with the peripherals as well
Paul Richards: wonderful. Well that has been a nice long show, I think we delivered a lot of information to our viewers. I think we learnt that we have to inform our viewers about this upcoming events and that’s what we’re doing, I mean we are trying. But there is more grants coming all the time
Tess Protesto: Now we know to keep an eye out and so do our viewers
Paul Richards: and we’ll bring you guys in again next time there is a major event maybe when that big firefighter one comes up we’ll bring some firefighters in they do a lot of training and are such an important part of our community. So thank you so much everybody for being part of this show
Tess Protesto: And thank you for joining us to our guest, it’s been a wealth as knowledge
Paul Richards: I see we have video link here, Bruce does some really great mobile cart as well, that’s kind of his specialty. So that’s it guys that’s our show, thank you for watching we’ll be back next Friday, we are interviewing Easy live, the very first ever cloud based live streaming video production software in the world and I’m really excited. Mark you won a free premium license for that so give it a go and thank you to the whole panel.
And that’s all folks, we appreciate your participation in the chat room and can’t wait to host our next informative Q&A section, your questions drive the conversation forward for live streaming professionals around the world. Until next time, Happy Streaming.