Leaders of the Lexington Regional Health Center toured the UNMC campus in August.
Leslie Marsh, CEO, was joined by other leaders for the visit, as well as UNMC graduate Brady Beecham, M.D., who is new in the department of family medicine at the Lexington Regional Health Center.
The group, which included chief nursing officer Nicole Thorell, Director of Rehabilitation Services Kirsten Fassler, and Aravind Menon, M.B.B.S., met with Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D., Dean of the College of Public Health Ali S. Khan, M.D., M.P.H., and other UNMC leaders. They toured the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, the iEXCEL Visualization Hub and met with leaders of the Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska.
“We really want to see if we can partner more closely with the med center to serve as a rural research area for them, as well as to see if there are areas for collaboration where we can learn and better serve our patients,” Marsh said. “We’d also like to do some research out in our rural areas, especially given the divide in health outcomes between people living in rural communities and people living in urban communities.”
Dr. Beecham did her rural rotation in Lexington as a UNMC medical student and returned to the community following her residency. She said she was excited by the possibility of collaboration between the two organizations.
“We are living in a rural community that is a great town and we have a great hospital,” she said. “But we know that people in rural Nebraska have worse health care outcomes, so we’re interested in thinking about how we try to make improvements in our own community and other places in rural Nebraska.”