Many patients, including United States veterans, face barriers to appropriate, affordable healthcare. These barriers can be addressed by optimizing clinic locations while delivering care that effectively utilizes providers’ practice responsibilities. We present models to evaluate veterans’ eye care facility location options with consideration for overall system access and present a case study in which trained technicians perform visual disease screenings typically conducted by ophthalmologists, as part of the VA's Technology-based Eye Care Services (TECS) program. In this seminar Dr. April Maa will review eye care in the VA, including the initiation of the TECS program. Adam VanDeusen will present how this program's utilization can be evaluated using facility location models.

April Maa, MD is an Associate Professor at Emory University School of Medicine in the Department of Ophthalmology, division of comprehensive ophthalmology. She completed her Bachelor of Science in Physiology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Upon graduation from McGill in 2000, she then attended medical school at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas from 2000-2004. Subsequently, she completed her ophthalmology residency at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Texas before moving to Atlanta in 2008. She joined Emory and the Atlanta VA in 2008, where she has remained as an active practicing clinician and clinical researcher. She currently is the Clinical Director of Technology-based Eye Care Services (TECS), a tele-ophthalmology program, for the Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) 7 Regional Telehealth Service that is based at the Atlanta VA Healthcare System. Dr. Maa began her career in telemedicine around the year 2012 when she first began doing research at the VA on Veterans’ eye disease prevalence and piloting studies to use telemedicine to improve eye care delivery. In 2015, she was awarded a pilot grant from VA Office of Rural Health to pilot 3 tele-eye sites. TECS was an enormous success, and has rapidly grown across the country to several states including Missouri, Omaha, Montana, and Illinois. Atlanta currently serves as the national VA ORH National Program Office for TECS spread across the VA enterprise, receiving approximately $2 million a year to continue to spread tele-ophthalmology across the country. Dr. Maa has received several accolades for her work in telemedicine at the VA including a ‘Honorable Mention’ for TECS by then Undersecretary of Health David Shulkin’s book “The Best Care Everywhere”; VISN 7 Big Idea Group Competition First Place Winner, the Mark Wolcott Award for Excellence in Clinical Care Leadership, and the 2018 Employee of the Year for the Atlanta VA in Scientific Achievement.

Adam VanDeusen is a PhD student in Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan working with Dr. Amy Cohn. His research applies operations research methods to public health policy, primarily access to care. Adam previously worked as a health systems engineer at Mayo Clinic and as Senior Director, Clinical Programs, at The Health Management Academy. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and his Master of Public Health in Chronic Disease Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health.

The seminar series “Providing Better Healthcare through Systems Engineering” is presented by the U-M Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety (CHEPS): Our mission is to improve the safety and quality of healthcare delivery through a multi-disciplinary, systems-engineering approach.
For additional information and to be added to the weekly e-mail for the series,
please contact genehkim@umich.edu