Herrmann Spetzler is the executive director of Open Door Community Health Centers based in Arcata, one of California’s many isolated rural communities. Spetzler’s mission is to narrow the distance between the state’s most far-flung residents and the quality health care more readily available in cities. His work involves both attracting doctors to remote areas as well as fostering the use of new cost-effective and life-saving technologies like telemedicine.
In the following interview, Spetzler provides a thought-provoking take on the unique challenges associated with rural health care, such as the following meditation on “healthy communities:”
“It’s difficult to get doctors to move to any communities that aren’t healthy communities. By healthy, I’m speaking about more than medicine. What makes a healthy community is a good solid infrastructure, and that includes healthcare, but it also includes schools. And it includes a certain economic development base, a certain number of good jobs.”
- “New medical center opens door for rural health,” The Eureka Reporter, chronicles the opening of Eureka’s Open Door Telemedicine and Visiting Specialist Center
- Rural Health Care Delivery: Connecting Communities Through Technology, California HealthCare Foundation
- Open Door Community Health Centers, headed by Herrmann Spetzler
- Rural Policy Health Institute, a national research and avocacy group
- California Rural Health Policy Council