Illinois Report Includes Telehealth

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s Office of Health Innovation and Transformation (GOHIT) http://www2.illinois.gov/gov/healthcarereform/Pages/GOHIT.aspx is responsible for directing the state’s health reform initiatives pertaining to the State’s Alliance for Health Innovation Plan awarded from CMS http://innovation.cms.gov

To achieve the goals needed, state health insurance plans, large provider organizations, public health practitioners, and more than 80 business, consumer, provider, and association stakeholders gathered to discuss issues related to healthcare to improve the effectiveness of the delivery system and how to lower costs for the residents.

As a result of the discussions, the report “State of Illinois From Innovation to Implementation” produced by the GOHIT on December 31, 2014 includes ideas for the use of telehealth in the state.

The GOHIT’s Workforce Work Group working on the report discussed new ideas and telehealth in their plans. The Work Group supports efforts to create a neutral telehealth platform to develop and implement “The Illinois Telehealth Initiative”, a plan to advance telehealth in the state.

The plan would be to establish demonstration projects. One project would be to provide telebehavioral health services to students in schools in both rural and urban settings. In addition, the plan would also conduct a demonstration project in an urban setting where telepsychiatry would supplement an existing behavioral health program. Also, the Work Group wants to conduct a consultation project with one nonprofit at two school sites and plan for a regional network of school clinics that would provide telebehavioral services.

Another objective is to conduct a demonstration project in both rural and urban settings to provide the same telebehavioral health services to children in locations other than in schools. The project, would provide the consultation-based telebehavioral health model within primary care since there are less than 300 child psychiatrists in the state. This would also mean that providers would be involved in mental health centers.

Another demonstration project would provide telebehavioral health services in hospital Emergency Departments (ED). The telehealth project would include care coordination and follow-up case management for crisis evaluation, triage plus follow-up care and liaison with local mental health services.

After the demonstration project is completed, the plan is to establish a statewide emergency telemental health evaluation and linkage service that would contract with qualified providers across the state to provide standardized evaluation and linkage services to any interested and/or underserved hospital ED.

The report also suggests the establishment of a Mobile Telestroke Unit to connect ambulances and medical teams to a stroke neurologist while the vehicle is in transit for patients suffering acute stroke. A telestroke network would increase the quality of access when caring for stroke patients.

The State plan calls for the expansion of telepsychiatry and telebehavioral health services for the more than 500 youths in the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice (IDJJ) www.idjj.state.il.us  facilities. Family involvement in the youth’s care improves a youth’s adjustment to programming and reduces recidivism. This however would require the use of telebehavioral health services so that family therapy could help in the treatment of their youth.

The plan would be to establish a demonstration project in both rural and urban jails and correctional institutions to connect soon-to-be-released prisoners via telehealth with Medicaid providers who will care for them upon release.

Lastly, the report suggests that a demonstration project is needed to expand primary care capacity in rural areas in order to provide care for patients with common complex chronic diseases. To effectively deal with chronic illnesses, a telehealth training program is needed to train and retrain primary care providers in rural communities.