• Center on Health Equity & Access
  • Clinical
  • Health Care Cost
  • Health Care Delivery
  • Insurance
  • Policy
  • Technology
  • Value-Based Care

Dr Curtis Lowery: The ANGELS Program and How It Benefits Patients

Video

Curtis Lowery, MD, chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and director of the Center for Distance Health, talks about the ANGELS program that he founded at his practice and the benefit it provides to patients.

Transcript:

How does your program, ANGELS, benefit high-risk pregnancies and what was the process of getting it Medicaid funded?

Well ANGELS stands for antenatal neonatal guidelines education learning system. The idea is that we would write down best practices and then be available to consult with patients anywhere they were. At that time they didn't pay for telemedicine, so Medicaid asked us to develop a program that would help in the [managing] of these patients across the state.

We then developed the telemedicine structure. We worked with Medicaid to come up with a way of [University of Arkansas Medical School, UAMS] paying the match to Medicaid. Medicaid works by the states providing 25%—in a poor state like Arkansas—25% of the money, and then the federal government gives us 75% of the total cost of the care. So, UAMS, the system, was able to come up with money for the match and so, then we could apply for federal money and then we got 75 cents on the dollar to establish the program.

Of course, all of this had to be approved through the Department of Medicaid and the Department of Human Services (DHS), and so that happened in 2003 when the program started.

Related Videos
Saad Z. Usmani, MD, MBA, FACP, FASCO, MSKCC
Rakendu Rajendran, MBBS
Vivek Bhalla, MD, Stanford University School of Medicine
Rayan Salih, MD, Northeast Georgia Health System
Deepak L. Bhatt, MD, MPH, MBA, FACC, FAHA, FESC, MSCAI, Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital
Varsha Tanguturi, MD, MPH, Mass General Hospital
 Khush Kharidia, MD, UT Southwestern
Alexandra M. Trevino, MD, Northwestern Medicine
Andrew Kuykendall, MD, Moffitt Cancer Center
David J. Maron, MD, FASPC, Stanford University School of Medicine
Related Content
© 2025 MJH Life Sciences
AJMC®
All rights reserved.