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Today in Health IT expanding Telehealth in schools. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. I wanna thank our sponsor for today's series Healthcare. They reached out about this time last year, a little over a year and a half really now, and said we'd love what you're doing.
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And today's story comes from Healthcare finance news. . It is expanding telehealth into schools proves effective to address children's health needs. And I know a lot of health systems already doing some facsimile of this, but I really like this program, so I'm gonna share some of it with you. Here's the excerpt from the article.
Rural communities across the country have struggled to maintain access to quality healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. One overlooked demographic as children. With those living in remote areas, more likely to rely on chip and Medicaid programs. Treating children in those areas has been a challenge, but one district in Missouri has found a winning strategy, establishing a school telehealth program.
I. Rose Gaddis rn, virtual Health Coordinator for Blessing Health Systems. Spoke about it at the HIMMS Conference in a presentation titled, piloting a School Telehealth Program in a rural community. When Blessing First implemented the telehealth program, the school district it served, had about 11,000 students.
The telehealth program was attractive because local healthcare providers were just a few miles away. From the district schools. So if it was determined that a student's virtual visit alone couldn't address their issue, they could get higher acuity care right around the corner. This made the telehealth program a hybrid model in which the school nurses connected students with health complaints to local providers via telehealth.
Where a determination could be made as to the best treatment path. The school nurses were very embedded in this process. Gata said, we didn't skimp on training them and we wanted to make them feel important in this, and we knew that would make the program successful. I. Training is always key and critical.
Early in the implementation process, Gaddis and the blessing and Teladoc teams needed to ensure that the technology was both reliable and flexible. Good customer support needed to be in place, and the school's wifi had to be upgraded to ensure there was no connectivity issues at critical times. If your child is sick.
You don't wanna have an IT problem clearly to make the program work. Everyone involved needed to ensure patient loyalty. To that end, they offered registration packets available online through the mail or in the school offices, as well as the ability to opt in or out of the program. Parents are contacted at each encounter, and a robust marketing campaign was launched to educate people about telehealth and the convenience and benefits it offers.
Gaddis Co-presented with Joseph De Vivo President, hospital and health Systems at Teladoc Health, and he essentially said the essence of the virtual care is to expand the specialist expertise beyond the borders. He said, you need the technology, the security, and the ability to amass all the data. And these are the challenges that exist in alternate sites like school systems.
I'm worried about my children's health today, Sid de Vivo. I'm worried about how they interact with people in schools. I think this potentially is the start of dealing with the pandemic, but also the immediacy of children's needs according to Gaddis blessing. And Teladoc also involve school counselors in order to add a layer of behavioral health.
To the mix they go on to talk about the success of the program. It has been extremely successful. 80% of the students opted in in the first year. We thought that that was pretty good for a community that didn't really know what telehealth is. We prevented one to two absences per week, and they also had a time that they were actually with the nurse.
Of 30 minutes or less. A lot of them averaging about 15 minutes, which is pretty good. The next step for the program is to expand it into more behavioral health and also to expand it into more schools. Alright, so that's the story. My so what on this is pretty simple. When I go to these conferences, I was always looking for successful programs where we could be fast followers, and this looks like a program, especially if I'm serving a rural population, that could be a good fit for many health systems.
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