About the Organization
While performing our autism and population health research, we kept hearing the same thing from rural Georgians: they wished there was an easy way for people without access to big-city resources to learn how to navigate autism.
Many autistic people and caregivers quickly learn that the challenges of autism care are different for those in rural areas – good information about autism care is hard to find, fewer facilities offer testing and treatment, and navigating the laws that apply to people with autism can get complicated. To help, we teamed up with the National Library of Medicine to create the Autism Toolkit.
The Autism Toolkit is an interactive website that solicits questions and feedback from rural community members who have been diagnosed with or are otherwise affected by autism. We use that feedback to create resources addressing the specific needs of autistic people living in rural communities.
The Autism Toolkit offers general information, such as autism-specific diets and medications used in treatment. It also has resource information, such as what early intervention therapy is and where to find it. And it has how-to guides that teach users about educational laws surrounding autism, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).
We hope the information that the Autism Toolkit provides is helpful. It’s important to us that we include rural community members in our content creation, so if you have an idea that you would like us to explore, please let us know! You can send us questions and make suggestions for new content using the Contact Us page and by joining our Facebook group.
The National Library of Medicine
The Autism Toolkit was created using a grant from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The NLM is part of the National Institutes of Health and is the world’s most extensive biomedical library. The NLM’s vast collection of resources is available for public use, and the NLM encourages communities across the United States to use its database for their healthcare needs.
To draw attention to the quality of NLM resources, we will highlight places where we have used NLM content to answer questions from the community.
Mercer University School of Medicine
Mercer University School of Medicine (MUSM) was founded in 1982 to train doctors and healthcare providers for rural and underserved areas in Georgia. Today, with four campuses spanning middle Georgia, MUSM teaches students in rural and underserved communities and works to eliminate health disparities in these areas.
The Autism Toolkit was created by Mercer University School of Medicine in 2023 through a G08 grant from the National Institutes of Health: National Library of Medicine.