The Oregon Health Authority www.oregon.gov/OHA/Pages/index.aspx and the Oregon Office of Rural Health www.ohsu.edu/xd/outreach/oregon-rural-health are partnering to implement telehealth pilot projects supported by Federal State Innovation Model grants www.innovations.cms.gov/initiatives/state-innovations. Five projects have been selected to run through June of 2016 and the results of the pilots will be available in fall of 2016.
The Adventist Health Tillamook Medical Group www.adventisthealth.org paramedics cover over one thousand square miles and respond to nearly 4,000 calls for service. The focus for the pilot is to reduce hospital readmissions related to gaps in care.
Adventist will put high-speed data connectivity in each ambulance to support direct, real-time communication with Rural Health Clinics (RHC). Hospital-Based Community Paramedics (CP) will visit patients identified as at-rick for hospital readmissions due to lack of post discharge follow up with a primary or specialty care provider.
The CP will be able to communicate directly with the RHC’s Care Coordinator or provider to help individuals manage their healthcare after they are home.
Another project called the HIV Alliance http://hivalliance.org will increase access to care for people in rural eastern and southern Oregon by using telehealth technology. The pilot will proactively engage pharmacists to be more dir3ectly involved with HIV specialists or primary care physicians through collaborative practice agreements.
The agreements will enable pharmacists to view and order labs for patients assess a patient’s current medications, identify problems in the regimen, make changes in the regimen as needed, and consult with HIV specialists, provide education consultation, and be able to follow up by monitoring patients.
The OHSU www.ohsu.edu Layton Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Center through a pilot program will expand telemedicine services across the state. The Center’s project will create a direct-to-home telemedicine program to include direct-to-home video dementia care using telemedicine technology.
The Trillium Family Services www.trilliumfamily.org project will make it a requirement for children in Secure Children’s Inpatient and Secure Adolescent Inpatient programs to be able to see a psychiatrist in their community in rural Oregon.
About 80 children will be seen by a psychiatrist and receive follow-up and medication management via telehealth each year that have been discharged from inpatient programs. In addition, care will be provided for about 300 children in rural school settings that presently are unable to access outpatient psychiatry services.
It has been shown by studies done in the state, that a remotely located dentist seeing a patient at a different location, can collaboratively deliver quality dental care. The Capitol Dental Care www.capitoldental.net pilot will target about 1,500 children in three elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school.
Telehealth connected oral health teams will be able to reach children who have not been receiving dental care on a regular basis and provide community-based dental diagnostic, prevention, and early intervention services.