S.Md. chosen for health-care pilot programs

$5 million in federal stimulus targets minorities, rural areas, homebound patients

Health care in Southern Maryland will benefit from two federal stimulus grants totaling nearly $5 million.

One grant, of more than $2.4 million, will create a national Bioethics Research Center. The center will study ethical issues and health disparities. It will work to foster trust in poor and minority communities about participating in medical studies.

The other grant, of more than $2.5 million, will install technology in the homes of about 250 homebound patients, allowing health-care providers to monitor and advise patients from afar.

U.S. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and state Sen. Thomas M. Middleton (D-Charles) announced the funding from the National Institutes of Health last week at Bel Alton High School in La Plata.

Minorities and the poor "suffer an undue burden of ill," said John Ruffin, director of NIH's National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. The agency's funds aim to improve health care in several rural areas of Maryland.

Ruffin said that since the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which about 400 black men were misled by doctors that they were being treated when they were not, many minorities do not trust clinical trials and will not participate in them, missing out on cutting edge health care.

"Maryland will respond to this national issue, and we will get answers," Cardin said.

Claudia R. Baquet of the University of Maryland School of Medicine applied for both grants and will lead the research. Baquet said that by identifying barriers and educating potential patients on the Eastern Shore, her team increased participation in clinical trials from two people in 2000 to 100 today.

She plans to expand the program by creating toolkits for area doctors in addition to educating the public. Baquet said she would like to reach 4,000 patients in the first two years of the pilot program.

"There is a need to help build more trust in minority communities to maximize participation," said Joan Jones, president of the Bel Alton High School Alumni Association Community Development Corp., which will host several of the educational seminars. "These will educate the doctor, as well as the patient."

The second grant will allow providers to put video cameras, blood pressure sleeves and other medical equipment in patients' homes so they can be monitored from a health-care center.

"There is no reason in the technological age we live in that anybody has to be disconnected" from health care, Hoyer said.