Dr. Teresa Owens Tyson is a family nurse practitioner and CEO of the Health Wagon. She recalls the story of a young woman in Southwest Virginia, who didn’t know she had cervical cancer, until it had progressed. She died at the age of 28.
“When they had an abnormal pap smear, they had nowhere to go for the colposcopy,” Tyson recalled. “So we went and learned how to do them ourselves.”
For more than a decade, Tyson and another provider have been performing these exams at their clinic in Wise, and in their mobile health vans. Joining remotely at the other end of the camera are specialists at UVA. This saves patients a five-hour drive to Charlottesville…