Utilizing Telehealth Platforms to Scale and Disseminate Evidence Based Health Promotion and Prevention Strategies

Current evidence suggests that social work is well positioned to implement, at scale, effective universal health promotion and prevention strategies designed to benefit all people and provide effective interventions in the context of commonly experienced risks (SSWR, 2016).  Telehealth is a promising service delivery platform that allows social workers to scale and disseminate evidence based interventions by utilizing information technologies in order to provide clinical prevention and behavioral health care at a distance. Telehealth is an expansion of telemedicine, but unlike telemedicine, which more narrowly focuses on the curative aspects, it encompasses preventative, promotive andcurative aspects. Telehealth technologies hold great promise for extending the reach of behavioral health and prevention interventions to hard to reach populations by eliminating distance and travel barriers and improving access to services that would often not be consistently available in underserved communities.

The Institute of Medicine reports that advanced telecommunication and information technologies have a role to play in transforming the health and behavioral health care system. Evidence-based models facilitated by these technologies can improve access to and quality of prevention and mental health care across the geographic and economic spectrum. The IOM concludes that technology should not be seen as a barrier, but something that facilitates access for more patients to interact with their providers. With this directive in mind, more research is required to develop appropriate quality standards for social workers to serve diverse populations through telehealth platforms.  Additionally, social workers require guidance on the effective implementation of telehealth approaches for service delivery and research.

The ultimate goal of this roundtable is to help social work researchers address challenges related to implementation and bringing intervention to scale by introducing key aspects related to Telehealth Service delivery and research. In this roundtable, discussants will share strategies and barriers for developing a telehealth clinic and delivering clinical telehealth services.  This discussion will be illustrated through examples of four programs that exemplify telehealth training or service delivery to high risk populations including: (1) training the social work workforce (including licensed clinical social workers and graduate social work interns) to engage in telehealth service delivery; (2) providing prevention and early intervention services to youth whose families are involved with the child welfare system; (3) providing home-based parent support for families with children prenatal to five years old, and (4) providing in-home mental health care to adults in permanent supportive housing.

In addition to strategies for implementing telehealth services in social work education programs and agencies, discussants will share common challenges and approaches for ensuring HIPAA compliance, electronic medical record (EMR) keeping, extracting data from EMR systems for research purposes, successfully applying for institutional review board approval to conduct telehealth research, coordinating with state and federal telehealth networks, and methods for disseminating telehealth research.