Regional Clinical Care

As the region’s leading academic medical center, UofL Health Care is committed to extending its services and expert care with other hospitals in the Commonwealth. In response to this dedication, a regional clinical care plan was developed in 2007 to partner UofL Health Care with other Kentucky health facilities to ensure patients throughout the state are receiving the best possible care.

Regional Care Partners



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How are the facilities connected?

The facilities are linked via a remote physician presence robot, which provides outlying hospitals the highly specialized expertise and support resources of the UofL medical faculty. The RP-7™ Robot, through the utilization of a secured wireless, broadband, internet connection, transmits physician care to patients in another location. Within moments of a request for a medical consultation, a UofL Health Care physician, seated at a computer ControlStation (either at home, office, airport terminal, or anywhere in the world that has a wireless connection) connects via the Internet to the RP-7™ Robot located in the partner hospital’s Emergency Room.

How does the physician see patients using the robot?

Through the robot (which stands 5 feet 6 inches tall), a doctor interacts and converses with a patient, patient’s family, physician or nurse through a live, two-way audio and video feed. Using a joystick, the camera and the guidance of 360-degree infrared sensors, the physician maneuvers the robot through the hospital to a patient’s bedside and move the robot’s head to view vital signs on monitors and charts. 

What are the benefits?

The robot allows University of Louisville physicians to be in two places at once, making it possible to provide appropriate diagnosis to a patient in another part of the state and then return to his/her patients in Louisville. The program is designed as a partnership with regional health centers that will create better diagnoses, allow patients to remain in their regions where appropriate and create a direct access to treatments in Louisville’s health care community.

Owensboro Medical Health System (OMHS) in Owensboro, Kentucky, was UofL Health Care’s first partner in the remote physician presence robot network. Since that initial collaboration, UofL Health Care has partnered with 11 other Kentucky health facilities (see full list below and the map to the right displaying UofL Health Care’s regionalization partners by county).

The network is the first of its kind in Kentucky, and provides quality medical care to hospitals in central and western Kentucky in a way that brings together the capacity at regional hospitals and those of the University Health Sciences Center. Through the University Health Sciences Center, the partner hospitals also have access to physicians specializing in stroke, neonatology and high-risk obstetrics.

Dr. Larry Cook, Executive Vice President for Health Affairs, conceived the UofL Health Care Central and Western Kentucky initiative after fifteen years of developing Health Sciences Center programs that could extend capacities and services across Kentucky. 

“Our intent is to complement the great services of our partner hospitals," said Dr. Cook.  "There are many highly qualified physicians providing service in Central and Western Kentucky. This is our attempt to provide a linkage between our academic medical center in Louisville, and those hospitals and physicians in Western and Central Kentucky wishing to access services on an as-needed basis."

List of UofL Health Care’s partners in the remote physician presence robot network:

  • Owensboro Medical Health System (OMHS), Owensboro, Kentucky
  • Spring View Hospital, Lebanon, Kentucky
  • Taylor Regional Hospital, Campbellsville, Kentucky
  • Trover Health System, Madisonville, Kentucky
  • Jennie Stuart Medical Center, Hopkinsville, Kentucky
  • Hardin Memorial Hospital, Elizabethtown, Kentucky
  • Pikeville Medical Center, Pikeville, Kentucky
  • TJ Samson Community Hospital, Glasgow, Kentucky
  • The Medical Center at Bowling Green, Bowling Green, Kentucky
  • Western Baptist Hospital, Paducah, Kentucky
  • Jackson Purchase Medical Center, Mayfield, Kentucky