Telehealth Resources

Telehealth: The broad use of electronic information and communication technologies to provide remote healthcare services including provider training, continuing medical education, public health education, administrative meetings, and electronic information sharing to help with clinical management and support of patients. 

Telemedicine: A subset of telehealth that entails provision of clinical healthcare services such as remote consultation, diagnosis, and treatment remotely without the need of in-person visits.  

Telebehavioral Health: A subset of telehealth with emphasis on provision of mental health and substance use treatment services such as therapy, psychiatric evaluations, and counseling, through remote telecommunication. 

To engage diverse community stakeholders in ways to advance school-based telemedicine and promote broad community supports for families.

• Recruit and retain wide range of family and child-serving system representatives to inform project activities, reinforce collaborative efforts, identify community resources, and work toward sustainability.
• Utilize broad community advisory group for input with ongoing and emergent concerns related to the school-based telemedicine services.
• Hold full group engagement meetings at least twice each year, with subcommittee meetings based on specific goals/deliverables with options to meet in person or via telehealth.
• Promote two-generation perspectives and gather resources from broad groups (e.g., housing, employment, TANF, education, adult healthcare) to build a supportive environment for the student receiving telehealth services.
• Explore community priorities through the CHA/CHIP and other needs assessment processes in order to identify additional potential services using school-based telemedicine, including asthma, oral health, diabetes management, concussion and other supports.

Following telemental health best practices, increase evidenced-based assessment, treatment, and adherence interventions for behavioral health and obesity.

• With school site and advisory group input, adapt telemedicine protocols across assessment, treatment and adherence for the range of behavioral health and obesity intervention with school-age population (K-12).
• Provide training and ongoing support to telemedicine coordinators and telefacilitators, including opportunities to shadow existing telefacilitators.
• Complete monthly videoconferencing calls among the telemedicine coordinators and telefacilitators to encourage “lessons learned”; invite speakers based on regional sites’ interests and needs.
• Provide evidenced-based telemedicine assessment, treatment and adherence interventions.
• Across key groups (families, rural personnel, providers), complete process measures associated with treatment over telemedicine, consistent with RE-AIM evaluation framework.
• Gather follow-up information across participating sites concerning barriers and facilitators, then seek additional behavioral and obesity services along with other pediatric services via telemedicine to meet the needs.
• Explore expansion of telemedicine services to support two generation health needs

Utilizing a range of distance education delivery approaches including Project ECHO, increase mentoring continuing education and opportunities for school-based telemedicine personnel.

• Complete ongoing need assessment with school-based health center and broader school personnel to identify educational topics of interest.
• Adapt behavioral and obesity management curriculum.
• Complete ECHO accreditation for educational credits including CME (Continuing Medical Education), CNE (Certified Nurse Educator), and CE (Continuing Education).
• Train the hub team in the ECHO telementoring approach, including completion of a “mock” ECHO.
• Train spoke sites in the ECHO approach and provide case templates for the de-identified case presentations.
• Complete bi-monthly ECHO sessions and archive content for review, and evaluate.

To adapt the 12345 Fit-tastic healthy weight collaborative approach for the rural Kansas audience and use telehealth to implement across rural school partners.

• Adapt and continuously improve the Fit-tastic collaborative approach and materials for the rural setting, drawing on input from the advisory group and experts in obesity, school-based services and rural health.
• Recruit, support, and retain Fit-tastic teams from the target rural schools and their communities.
• Liaise with pediatric obesity experts to provide telehealth presentations and support (the two) cohorts using videoconferencing.
• Implement Fit-tastic distance educational events, including the broader community educational events.
• Ongoing retention efforts and data collection from internal team personnel and from collaborative teams.
• Provide ongoing technical support, both in person and by video, around quality improvement strategies.

To support student participation in Telehealth ROCKS Schools activities across the workforce pipeline.

• Recruit health professional trainees to participate across project activities: Engagement, Services, Education/Mentoring, and Prevention.
• Gather feedback from trainee experiences and continue to improve the telemedicine experiences.
• Participate in AHEC (Area Health Education Centers) health careers promotions activities around the behavioral health and obesity intervention careers, emphasizing telehealth.