The National Science Foundation has awarded groups in three states a $1 million grant to form a plan to boost health and economic outcomes in the Mississippi River Delta.
The grant, part of the NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines Program, will go to groups in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana working to cut down on hunger and chronic disease and to improve access to healthcare.
Dr. Joe Thompson is president and CEO of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, which is leading the tri-state effort. He said it’s important to focus on the Delta, which continues to face longstanding challenges relating to health and wealth inequality.
“The Mississippi Delta has some of the worst health statistics of anywhere in the United States. Our proposal sought to apply what we learned during COVID about how to get remote monitoring, telemedicine, new pathways for people to be able to get good, nutritious foods, and apparently the National Science Foundation found that to be attractive,” Thompson said.
The grant will allow the groups to form a plan to use telehealth and over-the-counter home diagnostic equipment to boost health outcomes, as well as new strategies to boost access to healthy food. Thompson says it’s a chance to use some of the breakthroughs made in the virtual healthcare space made during the COVID-19 pandemic in areas which may not have benefitted from them.
“With our partners in the other states, we came together and identified these areas; being able to get food to people in their homes, being able to provide monitoring, new technologies in the health space,” Thompson said. “We thought this is a unique opportunity to bring the goal of the Engines program, to actually bring geographies that have been left behind by the technology world into the 21st Century.”
Thompson says the more than 30 collaborators will begin to meet in-person next fall, with the goal of eventually applying for another grant which could reach into the tens of millions of dollars.
