The use of telehealth services is rapidly expanding at Nationwide Children’s Hospital https://www.nationwidechildrens.org located in Ohio, to quickly adapt the way care is delivered in response to COVID-19. Tim Robinson, CEO, Nationwide Children’s reports, “We had to adapt quickly and we were able to effectively implement our expanded telehealth services. Even after COVID-19 is behind us, it will be important to continue to innovate and provide much needed telehealth services.”
Columbus Ohio based American Electric Power (AEP) made a gift of $1 million from the AEP Foundation https://www.aep.com to enable the hospital to lay the groundwork that led to the rapid expansion of telehealth services.
Big Lots Behavioral Health Services at Nationwide Children’s was the first to offer online telehealth visits. From March 13 to April 2, 2020, they provided more than 8,000 telehealth encounters as compared to just 19 telehealth visits in 2019. Today, most behavioral health appointments will be moving to telehealth only for outpatient visits for the duration of the COVID-19 response.
The Heart Center https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/specialties/heart-center-cardiology uses telemedicine to provide the electronic transmission of cardiac data from a remote site to The Heart Center. At that point, patients’ cardiac studies are stored and transmitted to specialists at the Heart Center where specialists analyze interpret and make clinical decisions based on the data.
In an important step, the Ohio Department of Medicaid has taken Emergency Actions in the state to expand telehealth services to include a wide array of medical, clinical, and behavioral health providers, and counselors. Medicaid has also eased technology restrictions on patient-physician interaction to deliver telehealth services.
The Ohio Department of Medicaid now allows both new and established patients to receive services through interactive video conferencing and explicitly overrides the initial face-to-face visit requirement previously needed to initiate telehealth services.
In order to further increase the use of telehealth services in hospitals and medical facilities, broadband has to increase in the state. Based on available information, 300,000 households in Ohio, representing about 1 million residents are estimated to lack access to broadband internet.
InnovateOhio, http://innovateohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/innovate under the direction of Lt. Governor Jon Husted, released the Ohio Broadband Strategy which is a comprehensive plan for ways to aggressively expand and enhance the state’s broadband network.
The plan will qualify local governments in Ohio to receive 20 additional points on applications for federal ReConnect funding. Also, InnovateOhio is working with Connected Nation Ohio to produce broadband availability maps each with interactive GIS map layers.