CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA – For the first time ever, Karen Rheuban, MD, won't be attending the American Telemedicine Association's International Meeting & Trade Show. But she has a good reason.

As director of the University of Virginia's Center for Telehealth, medical director of the Office of Telemedicine and Associate Dean for Continuing Medical Education, she's keeping a high profile guiding one of the more successful telehealth programs in the country. And that means pushing, pulling and prodding supporters, legislators and potential contributors to keep the telemedicine trend going.

Rheuban, a former ATA president whose telemedicine consultation that saved the life of a Chinese orphan half a world away galvanized an ATA audience two years ago in Tampa Bay, will be representing the UVA Center for Telehealth in Virginia's capital of Richmond during next week's ATA 2013 event in Austin, Texas. But her accomplishments won't go unnoticed. This week, the center was selected as the first member of Cisco's new Healthcare Center of Excellence program. 

"The Cisco Healthcare Center of Excellence program is an important part of our strategy in the way we serve our customers and partners," said Linda Boles, chief strategist for Cisco's U.S. Public Sector Healthcare Innovation division, in a press release. "We are pleased to work with the University of Virginia Center for Telehealth in showcasing its contributions to the healthcare industry."

Launched in 1994 as the UVA Center for Telehealth, an outreach center for the UVA Health System, the program has grown steadily into a national model, being named last year as one of 14 regional telehealth resource centers by the federal government. The center now connects 109 sites across the Commonwealth of Virginia. 

According to David C. Gordon, director of the center's office of telemedicine, director of rural network development and co-director of the Health Appalachia Institute, the telemedicine network has enabled more than 30,000 patient encounters across more than 40 specialties, saving Virginians roughly 7.8 million miles of travel. 

"It's quite a spectrum of collaborations," says Rheuban, who sees collaboration as the key to developing new programs. "We're always asking, where is the next place we can go? What are the state's major healthcare challenges, and how can we address them?"

And while the center serves as a model for other telehealth centers around the country, it faces the same barriers that others do – namely, limited reimbursement through federal Medicare funding often based on an outdated definition of "rural" healthcare; pushback from some providers and patients who don't see the value in it; and confusing legal and policy guidelines that stifle innovation.

Rheuban says the center has forged valuable relationships with commonwealth officials, payers and provider networks that have paved the way for new projects, among them a partnership with Habitat for Humanity to build mHealth-enabled homes for people with chronic conditions; a telemedicine program targeting high-risk pregnant mothers that has helped reduce pre-term births by some 25 percent; one of the nation's first telehealth clinics for cystic fibrosis; and a recent expansion of the center's stroke treatment capabilities through a partnership with Specialists on Call.

"We go where the services are otherwise unavailable," says Gordon, who envisions the center taking on even more specialties in the future. That, he says, is one of the center's four guidelines.

The others? "Find your champions," "Watch out for reimbursements" and "Try it."