Hudson Headwaters Receives Grant from Stewart’s and Dake Family
Funds To Be Used For New Equipment
Stewart’s Shops and the Dake Family Foundations have donated $55,000 to Hudson Headwaters Health Network to acquire hand-held ultrasound devices that are used to help diagnose patient conditions.
“Stewart’s and the Dake family are committed to strengthening all our shops’ communities,” said Susan Dake, President of the Stewart’s Foundation. “Hudson Headwaters brings excellent care and medical innovations to the North Country. We are happy to support this new program.”
“We’re deeply grateful to Stewart’s and the Dake family for supporting us in our efforts to improve patient care,” said D. Tucker Slingerland, MD, vice president for strategy. He said that the new devices will also be part of Hudson Headwaters’ training of third-year medical students.
Dubbed as “the stethoscope of the future,” the handheld ultrasound does not replace the stethoscope as much as it adds a powerful tool to increase a physician’s ability to diagnose conditions and communicate with patients. Two Hudson Headwaters’ physicians have been testing the new technology since March.
Slingerland said that hand-held ultrasound devices have been used successfully with cardiac and obstetric patients. “We’re applying it to the primary care setting where it is proving to have wide application. This grant will allow us to expand the number of physicians who will have training for and access to this type of technology-both for our current group of physicians but also future providers who will be working with us as students.”
The use of handheld ultrasound devices will be limited initially to Hudson Headwaters’ two urgent care centers, the Health Center on Broad Street and the Warrensburg Health Center, and primary care services at our West Mountain Health Services primary care facility (Building 2).
“This is a highly useful tool that enables primary care providers to directly visualize organs and systems, and to use these observations to guide clinical decision making,” Slingerland said. He added that the hand-held ultrasound has proven to be a useful tool in demonstrating to patients the effects of their conditions (someone with untreated hypertension can see the thickening of their own heart wall, for instance).
Hudson Headwaters is a not-for-profit, community-based network of 17 health centers serving the Adirondack North Country and Glens Falls Region since 1981. Its services include comprehensive primary care, obstetrics and gynecology, behavioral health, dentistry, lab, imaging, and more.