Surgery chair named honorary president of Kosovo telemedicine group

By Lorraine Cichowski
VCU News Services

Dr. Ronald C. Merrell, Stuart McGuire professor and chair of the Department of Surgery in VCU's School of Medicine, has been named honorary president of the Telemedicine Association of Kosovo, one of several healthcare initiatives in war-ravaged Kosovo involving VCU faculty.

The honor was granted to Merrell at the First Intensive Balkan Telemedicine Seminar, a three-day conference in late October that attracted world-renowned scholars and industry experts to discuss ways to transform healthcare in developing countries. Merrell and his team from VCU were praised for initiating the telemedicine program in Kosovo, a province of Serbia in the former Central European country of Yugoslavia that is attempting to rebuild after a devastating 1999 war.

"This project in telemedicine could be among the most-promising of any of the efforts to reform health care in Kosovo," said Merrell, who also is director of the Medical Informatics and Technology Applications Consortium (MITAC), a NASA-sponsored research lab within the Department of Surgery focused on telemedicine, medical informatics and medical technology. "I'm very proud of the role that VCU is playing to bring technology and surgical expertise to a country trying so hard to restore its medical and healthcare system."

Merrell opened the Kosovo seminar with a live transmission via the Internet of a laparoscopic surgery conducted in an operating room at MCV Hospitals by Dr. Eric J. DeMaria, professor and director of VCU's Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery. Images included a picture of the operating room and views inside the abdominal cavity and down the gastric tube.

More than 300 people were in the audience, including the prime minister of Kosovo, Dr. Bajram Rexhepi.

Faculty attending from VCU included Rifat Latifi, M.D., assistant clinical professor with the Department of Surgery. Latifi attended medical school at the University of Kosovo and is president and CEO of the International Virtual e-Hospital Network of Kosovo and president of the Kosovo Foundation for Medical Development as well as general director of the Telemedicine Project of Kosovo.

Also attending were David Salter, M.D., associate professor of surgery, and Brett Harnett, director of experimental information technology at MITAC.