Regionalization of children's hospitals has led to higher quality of care and improved outcomes among pediatric patients. However, children living in non-urban areas are often excluded from pediatric specialty care. Telemedicine is a novel means of filling the "specialist void" in rural communities and a way of establishing a new health care delivery model for the challenging setting.

Enhanced video technology allows UC Davis to offer expertise to rural health-care facilities that typically have less access to pediatric critical-care and emergency-medicine physicians, pharmacists, and pediatric sub-specialists, among others. The telemedicine program offers child-abuse consultation and evaluation, child development, endocrinology, gastroenterology, oncology and hematology, and psychiatry, among others. The UC Davis pediatric critical-care telemedicine program was the first of its kind in the United States. UC Davis also uses its telemedicine technology to connect hospitalized patients with family members and friends who may be unable to visit them and to bring medical interpreters together more quickly with the physician and a patient’s family when language barriers exist.