Hadley Foundation Funds New Software for Five FHSU Departments

ADAM Heart View

The Hadley Foundation of Hays has made an $80,000 donation to FHSU for the purchase of new software that will help students in health-related fields learn more about the human body.

The Hadley Foundation is a local organization that mainly supports the Hays Medical Center. Its resources come from the estate of the late Mark Hadley whose ancestors were early settlers of Ellis County and successful in the ranching and oil business.

Animated Dissection of Anatomy for Medicine (A.D.A.M.) software will be used in the departments of Nursing, Health and Human Performance, Biology, Allied Health and Communication Disorders. The software comes in two parts: anatomy and physiology.

It allows students to literally strip away layers of the human body slice-by-slice. Traveling through the body, one can view detailed illustrations of skin, muscle and bone layers, continuing deep into the body through organs and tissues. Multiple anatomical structures and physiological systems can be extracted on the computer and explored as well.

Helen Miles

“Students can view the human body almost three dimensionally,” explained Helen Miles, assistant professor of Health and Human Performance. “They get to see all the structures and how they relate to each other in spatial arrangement. It gives a realistic representation of how the body is put together.”

The physiology portion has video, sound and animations that show cellular and molecular processes in action.

The anatomy package will be server-based, providing access at any time from a laptop or home computer. Because the physiology package is lab-based, the Hadley Foundation’s donation includes 15 new desktop computers each with a licensed copy of the software that will be housed in Cunningham and Albertson halls.

Joe Jeter, a member of the Hadley Foundation board of directors, said the software donation is an investment in the future workforce of the Hays medical community. “We feel like it’s a direct benefit to the Hays Medical Center to train students who are majoring in a health-related field because they may potentially become employees of the hospital,” Jeter said. “The better trained they are, the better the service is for everyone in the community and the area.”