Marc Ringel
MD
CO, USMarc Ringel is a family physician who has practiced for ten years in Brush, Colorado, a town of 6000 people. He has also practiced in Ripon, Wisconsin and in Yuma, Colorado, as well as having served for nine years on the faculty of North Colorado Family Medicine Residency Training Program in Greeley.
In the early 1990s, while with the residency Dr. Ringel developed and oversaw the first years of a Rural Training Track program in Wray, Colorado, still the smallest town in the United States with a full-time graduate medical training program. During his tenure at the residency he served as director of Continuing Medical Education for North Colorado Medical Center, a tertiary regional medical center. For seven years he served as Medical Education Director for CPEP, a nationally-recognized program based in Denver that does educational assessments of and learning plans for physicians.
His interest in informatics and later in telehealth dates back to his first practice in Yuma, a frontier medical community on the Colorado High Plains. That interest manifested as a teacher of family practice residents headed for rural practice, inspiring him to write the book, Accessing Medical Information From A Desert Island With Telephone Service. He also wrote, in collaboration with Jeff Bauer, Telemedicine and the Reinvention of Healthcare, published by McGraw-Hill in 1999.
As physician champion, Ringel has been instrumental in developing a number of telehealth programs that thrive in Brush. He has written extensively for both professional and lay publications on a wide range of medical topics and has done consulting and speaking on CME, telehealth, rural health, and medical staff issues for over a decade. Ringel, whose business card says, "Practicing Family Doctor," believes that his practice informs his consulting and his consulting informs his practice.
Marc Ringel is a family physician who has practiced for ten years in Brush, Colorado, a town of 6000 people. He has also practiced in Ripon, Wisconsin and in Yuma, Colorado, as well as having served for nine years on the faculty of North Colorado Family Medicine Residency Training Program in Greeley.
In the early 1990s, while with the residency Dr. Ringel developed and oversaw the first years of a Rural Training Track program in Wray, Colorado, still the smallest town in the United States with a full-time graduate medical training program. During his tenure at the residency he served as director of Continuing Medical Education for North Colorado Medical Center, a tertiary regional medical center. For seven years he served as Medical Education Director for CPEP, a nationally-recognized program based in Denver that does educational assessments of and learning plans for physicians.
His interest in informatics and later in telehealth dates back to his first practice in Yuma, a frontier medical community on the Colorado High Plains. That interest manifested as a teacher of family practice residents headed for rural practice, inspiring him to write the book, Accessing Medical Information From A Desert Island With Telephone Service. He also wrote, in collaboration with Jeff Bauer, Telemedicine and the Reinvention of Healthcare, published by McGraw-Hill in 1999.
As physician champion, Ringel has been instrumental in developing a number of telehealth programs that thrive in Brush. He has written extensively for both professional and lay publications on a wide range of medical topics and has done consulting and speaking on CME, telehealth, rural health, and medical staff issues for over a decade. Ringel, whose business card says, "Practicing Family Doctor," believes that his practice informs his consulting and his consulting informs his practice.
Leveling the Playing Field for Rural Healthcare with Telehealth Services
Technology, intelligently applied, can bring a wealth of healthcare services to rural patients, as well as stabilizing and enriching the local medical community. This presentation is practical, based in large part on actual experience in developing rural telehealth programs, as well as theoretical, examining telehealth in the context of the unique challenges posed to rural healthcare institutions.
Telehealth as a Marketing Tool
This presentation is sort of a mirror image of the preceding one on rural telehealth. It is targeted to larger healthcare institutions that are interested in exploiting telehealth technology to provide services within their larger service area or, for that matter, in crossing boundaries to offer services anywhere in the world that is within reach of electronic communication.
Intelligent Use of Information Technology to Deliver the Best Patient Care
This presentation focuses as much on what technology cannot do as on what it can do. For many functions, machines outperform humans. On the other hand, there are human skills that devices aren't likely to match for the foreseeable future. Human versus machine capability is analyzed with an eye toward a strategy for developing and deploying clinical information systems that enhance the patient-provider relationship by freeing the clinician to do what people do best (e.g....
Communicating with Physicians
This presentation provides a theoretical underpinning for understanding why physicians, based on our training and socialization, behave the way we do. Such an understanding is a starting point for developing solid relationships with doctors. Robust relationships are, of course, a prerequisite for truly involving this critical stakeholder group in the healthcare enterprise. A practical list of principles and tips for getting along with doctors is also provided.
A Rational Approach to Continuing Medical Education
In every context, how well physicians and other healthcare professionals keep up with their fields is crucial to the quality of medical care. It is clearly impossible to know everything about even the smallest slice of the narrowest clinical subspecialty. In the absence of all-knowing professionals, creating an environment in which clinicians are encouraged to learn and collaborate and providing them with the information tools that keep them abreast of best practices is the...
