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By Blake Boles 
TONOPAH, NV (October 21st, 2016) — Brandi Matheny is one busy lady.  
In addition to being a veterans service officer for the Nevada Department of Veterans Services, the Navy vet also frequently travels out to Pahrump to advise and counsel veterans there. Her services are sorely needed, as the veteran population of Pahrump is almost 25%. Many of Nevada’s rural towns have much in common. First, they have a high percentage of veterans, though maybe not as high as Pahrump. Secondly, with almost 300,000 veterans in Nevada, many of those rural towns are underserved. As effective as Matheny is, it isn’t practical for her to travel out to all rural towns in Nevada. Which is why NDVS’s acceptance of technology is soon to be a boon to rural veterans across the state.  
 
In partnership with Great Basin College, Matheny will be able to conduct interviews via telehealth. Telehealth, as its name suggests, is the usage of video cameras and plasma monitors over high speed internet in order to administer to previously inaccessible patients. This program is the first of its kind for NDVS, and expansion of it will rely on the success of this pilot program. The move is welcome by many rural vets and veteran service officers alike, including Matheny. 
 
“Advances in technology have made it faster and easier to access needed resources,’ she says. “Although not much can be done to replace the ‘human factor’, it can allow us to reach and be in several different places at once.” Matheny hopes that the word spreads through rural veteran communities throughout the state, despite not having a physical human being in situ. That’s a responsibility that NDVS takes on itself. 
 
“I always tell my clients, that we have a job to do with getting this information out as much as we can,” she says. “It doesn’t help to tell someone ‘the benefits are there, you just have to ask for them’, because people don’t know what they don’t know.” It is Matheny’s job to assess each client and inform them of the benefits they have earned. Something that is going to greatly expand to those in Tonopah quite soon.