Julie Hall-Barrow, EdD, Vice President Virtual Health and Innovation at Children’s Health System of Texas https://www.childrens.com, talked about the large growing market for healthcare for Children living in Texas. She was speaking at the 9th Annual mHealth+ Telehealth World Conference www.worldcongress.com recently held in Boston.
She pointed out how important it is for children in the state to have access to good healthcare since they have significant community needs. The fact is that 29 percent of Dallas county children live in poverty plus 18 percent of children in the county are uninsured.
This has resulted in 50,000 children in North Texas with pediatric medical needs since 50,000 children in North Texas are asthmatic, 36 percent are overweight or obese, 28 percent are malnourished, and 30 percent of toddlers are not fully immunized.
The Texas Children’s Health System is able to cope using effective virtual health services to provide care. The hospital offers interactive consults on critically ill children via their TeleER/TeleNICU system. Hospital TeleConsultations (non-emergent) are provided for neonatology and neuro-immunology, plus technology is used to provide remote study interpretations in cardiology, ophthalmology, and for radiology reads.
School telehealth is being used for over 8.700 school-based virtual visits to cover 118 schools starting this this fall which will help school age children in over 12 counties. Five percent of emergency department visits are made during school hours by using a kiosk to enable the diagnosis to be made via telemedicine.
The Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) program enables Children’s Health to monitor and connect with patients with chronic diseases, post-surgery, or to connect with children that may need monitoring after discharge.
For example, RPM enables children to be monitored that have had transplants but some children still require monitoring after discharge. Children’s Health is the first U.S pediatric institution to utilize digitized drugs to monitor medication adherence in pediatric transplant patients.
“My Asthma Pal.” a mobile app, has helped in a number of cases. The app is designed to enhance asthma self-management and education with the long term goal of reducing preventable events such as asthma-related emergency department admissions.
Children’s Health is leveraging technology that will include using telehealth services for adults as well as children. The use of these new telehealth technologies has produced two successful programs.
One program called “Family Health On Call”, uses a mobile app for on-demand house calls. The other program “Family Health Virtual Visit” uses a kiosk to enable virtual access to the child’s healthcare provider and other healthcare professionals from the comfort of the home.
Julie Hall-Barrow reports, “Children’s Health is always looking for ways to improve services and expand to a larger demographic to not only provide new ways for children and parents to have access to care but to also enable the hospital system to provide these services utilizing minimal overhead.”