MEDFORD, Ore. (AP) - Dennis Beaudoin gets his daily checkup from a nurse without leaving home. While the Medford man recovered from a heart attack, his doctor wanted to know his blood pressure and his weight and his blood sugar every day, but his health was too fragile for visits to the doctor's office.

Recently a home-health nurse would have visited him. Now computers and telephone lines allow nurses to check on patients like Beaudoin.

The new approach is part of "telemedicine," which uses computers, video cameras and information technology to provide health care and is useful in semi-rural areas such as Southern Oregon, where home-health nurses have to drive long distances to see patients who can't leave home.

"We can listen to their heart and lungs," said Lori Pierpoint-Case, a home-health nurse at Rogue Valley Medical Center. "If there's a problem we can call and talk to them."

Patients leave the hospital with monitoring equipment and a console that connects to their home phone.

"Everything is all explained," Beaudoin said, "and the program tells you what to do. It was real easy.

"I sat in the morning and took my blood pressure and oxygen level and recorded it on the monitor, and the telephone called that in," he said. "It's very, very user friendly," Pierpoint-Case said. "It speaks to them, or they can read (the instructions). One patient who's 92 lived alone and she was able to do it. All the patient needs is a power source and a phone line. There's no computer (at the patient's home)."

The computer is in the home-health office, where the data is recorded for physicians. Nurses call patients at least once a week for a live "video encounter."

The image quality is good enough that nurses can examine wounds or read the label of a patient's prescription drugs. Patient privacy is assured because the data and live encounters are transmitted on phone lines, not on the Internet.

RVMC's parent company, Asante Health System, won a $300,000 grant for the project from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service. Home-health nurses are using the equipment for patients from RVMC and Three Rivers Hospital in Grants Pass.

Tom Brown, Asante's director of home health and hospice, said the hospital will apply for another grant to expand the system to serve patients in Northern California and the Oregon Coast. Brown said the service has been used mostly with Medicare patients. Private insurers tend not to pay for it.

"Hopefully, we're moving toward an era when private insurers will eventually pay for this," he said. The service is offered only to patients who are homebound by definition, not for convenience.

"That means leaving home is a taxing and difficult endeavor," said Pam Whiteing, a home-health nurse at RVMC. "If you're going out to dinner, you don't qualify for home health."