Description: Teledermatology has the potential to improve access for patient care within local and global health care systems and provide an efficient, patient-centered experience. Teledermatology can be used to improve patient care, access, and outcomes in a variety of ways, including triage, urgent care, inpatient consultation, direct follow-up with known patients, and patient monitoring, when integrated into the patients' overall medical care. In order to optimize the use of telemedicine in a particular site, many issues need to be taken into account, including motivation of providers to participate, participation of local health care entities, provider and patient access to high speed internet/ cellular service, and m any others. This lecture will cover a global experience with teledermatology, as well as challenges and pitfalls that can be faced when working with technology in low resource environments.

Carrie L. Kovarik, MD is an Associate Professor of Dermatology, Dermatopathology, and Infectious Diseases at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Kovarik has a special interest in global and community health, telemedicine, informatics, and HIV-related skin disease. She created the Penn Dermatology Global Health program, through which she works to provide clinical care and education in developing countries and underserved communities in the United States. Dr. Kovarik is the Head of Dermatology, Informatics, and Telemedicine for the Botswana-UPenn Partnership and has created a global telemedicine consult service which is a collaborative effort between Ministries of Health, local telecommunication and software companies, universities, specialty organizations, numerous countries, and local governments. She is now focusing on developing, sustaining, and researching new models of health care that can increase access to care through telemedicine.

Description:  Presently, there is no early diagnosis system for ovarian cancer, resulting in later diagnoses and poorer prognoses of the disease. At the Penn Vet Working Dog Center, we are training dogs to alert on malignant ovarian cancer when presented with plasma samples of human patients. Our project has aimed to answer two questions. First, can we train dogs on cancer cell lines to alert on cancer plasma? This would reduce the need for increasing numbers of plasma samples, one hurdle to get over when training cancer detection dogs. Second, can we use dogs to inform us in our end-goal to make an early-detection system for ovarian cancer? Together with our collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania and Monell, we hope to make an 'electronic nose' early detection system that can be used to diagnose ovarian cancer at earlier stages, when the disease has a significantly higher survival rate.