Children's Medical Center Dallas - “School-based Telemedicine,” Best Practices
Improving the Patient Experience
-
Improving the Patient Experience
Improving the whole patient journey to ensure a positive patient experience, from clinical and administrative, to financial, and everything in between.
Children's Medical Center Dallas - “School-based Telemedicine,” Best Practices
Children's Medical Center Dallas - “School-based Telemedicine,” Best Practices
Children's Medical Center Dallas is the main hospital campus of Children's Health, and provides expert pediatric health, wellness & acute care services in Dallas and throughout Texas. The school-based telemedicine program was started to use technology innovation to reach kids where they spend most of their time, which is at school. The program brings health services to campuses and promotes health literacy. We assessed the need for this technology through conversations with community partners to learn how to best serve the community. One of the problems we identified was that many kids did not having access to care due to a shortage of pediatricians that accept Medicaid. We found that there are opportunities to bring care to the school setting and reach kids where they are in schools. We then started a pilot and targeted families who are struggling in terms of access to care. We received state funding for the program and launched it at 30 campuses. We are now in final phase and are in 97 schools. This program brings a lot convenience to families as it is usually difficult for parents to take time off from work to take their children to the doctor.
Best Practices
- Outreach - We did a lot of meeting the neighbors, introduced the concept of telemedicine and offered a value proposition to the schools. Initially we had 4 to 5 schools. We went to school boards, families, community pediatricians, family doctors and law makers (legislatures) regarding billing. To our victory, they passed house bill 78 to allow for telemedicine in school setting. We met resistance from the Community at large – resistance from families. To overcome this, we developed a family and parental engagement plan. Community providers worried that we were only doing this to gain more patients so we had to meet with constituents before launching to explain the value it will bring to them. School board and leaders were also resistant. We realized that we needed to have a great message on how program would be successful on campuses.
- Coordination - Initial implementation team had to bring in a lot of internal partners such as marketing, PR, compliance and legal, internal doctors, nurse practitioners and IT team.
- Legal and compliance (FERPA) and HIPAA – types of data needs to be spelled out for agreement purposes
