School-Based Telemedicine for Hypertension Management in Urban Adolescents.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to determine if hypertensive adolescents from impoverished neighborhoods in Rochester, New York have improved blood pressure (BP) control with the use of school-based telemedicine. METHODS: Adolescents receiving antihypertensive medication had monthly study telemedicine visits at school. BP was measured by a telehealth clinical assistant (CTA) at the school using standard procedures, followed in real time by a teleconferencing visit with the study physician. RESULTS: Six participants were enrolled, and all completed school-based telemedicine visits prior to school closure due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Mean systolic and diastolic BP at baseline were 139 ± 5 and 75 ± 8 mmHg. All six participants had significant improvement in their blood pressure (final school mean BPs, 127 ± 4 and 67 ± 5 mmHg; systolic, baseline vs. final, p = .003). DISCUSSION: In this pilot study, adolescents with very high levels of neighborhood disadvantage had consistent adherence with school-based telemedicine and significant improvement in hypertension (HTN) control.

Telehealth: Opportunities to Improve Access, Quality, and Cost in Pediatric Care.

The use of telehealth technology to connect with patients has expanded significantly over the past several years, particularly in response to the global coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. This technical report describes the present state of telehealth and its current and potential applications. Telehealth has the potential to transform the way care is delivered to pediatric patients, expanding access to pediatric care across geographic distances, leveraging the pediatric workforce for care delivery, and improving disparities in access to care. However, implementation will require significant efforts to address the digital divide to ensure that telehealth does not inadvertently exacerbate inequities in care. The medical home model will continue to evolve to use telehealth to provide high-quality care for children, particularly for children and youth with special health care needs, in accordance with current and evolving quality standards. Research and metric development are critical for the development of evidence-based best practices and policies in these new models of care. Finally, as pediatric care transitions from traditional fee-for-service payment to alternative payment methods, telehealth offers unique opportunities to establish value-based population health models that are financed in a sustainable manner.

Telehealth in pediatric primary care.

Telehealth in the broadest sense has been used by pediatric clinicians for over a century, as telephone triage has been and continues to be an essential part of pediatric practice. Utilizing more advanced technology including video communication, although available, was generally underutilized until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Telehealth presents the opportunity to bridge many divides including geographical and logistical challenges. Many acute pediatric conditions can be managed safely and effectively through telehealth especially when remote physical exam equipment is used. Telehealth can also be especially useful in medical care of children with medical complexity. Traveling with medical equipment to multiple subspecialists can be incredibly challenging and often a similar quality visit can be conducted through telehealth in the comfort of a child's home environment. Well child care presents a unique problem while trying to maintain social distancing. Integrating a hybrid model using both an in-person exam and history through video conferencing can help balance limited face to face time with the need to ensure a full and appropriate physical exam. Integration of telehealth into the pediatric patient centered medical home can enable families to gain convenience while maintaining the essential relationship with their primary care office.

A Quality Improvement Initiative to Improve Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Follow-Up Rates Using School-Based Telemedicine.

OBJECTIVE: Patients with a new diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who are prescribed stimulant medication need regular follow-up. Guidelines recommend follow-up within 30 days of stimulant initiation or change but this goal is seldom achieved. This quality improvement (QI) study in an urban academic outpatient practice aimed to: 1) assess whether use of school-based telemedicine increases rates of follow-up within 30 days and decreases the number of days to follow-up for ADHD, and 2) compare rates of 30-day follow-up via in-person vs telemedicine visits. METHODS: We performed three Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles over a 12-month period: QI interventions included clinic wide education, paper prompts for clinicians, and creation of a database to track ADHD patients. We measured days from the index visit to the follow-up visit, and the mode of both visits (in-person or telemedicine). Data were collected for 6 months pre-intervention and 12 months post-intervention. RESULTS: Follow-up within 30 days increased from 19% (of 191 visits) to 33% (of 661 visits) (P < .001). The time to follow-up decreased from 67 to 34 days (P < .001). Follow up visits by telemedicine were more also more likely to be within 30 days (62% vs. 32%, P < .001). DISCUSSION: A QI intervention for ADHD care increased rates of follow-up within 30 days, particularly when telemedicine was used, and decreased the number of days to follow-up. This intervention could serve as a model to improve follow-up for ADHD in other settings.

Telehealth: Improving Access to and Quality of Pediatric Health Care.

All children and adolescents deserve access to quality health care regardless of their race/ethnicity, health conditions, financial resources, or geographic location. Despite improvements over the past decades, severe disparities in the availability and access to high-quality health care for children and adolescents continue to exist throughout the United States. Economic and racial factors, geographic maldistribution of primary care pediatricians, and limited availability of pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists all contribute to inequitable access to pediatric care. Robust, comprehensive telehealth coverage is critical to improving pediatric access and quality of care and services, particularly for under-resourced populations.

Pediatric Telehealth in the COVID-19 Pandemic Era and Beyond.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic led to an unprecedented demand for health care at a distance, and telehealth (the delivery of patient care using telecommunications technology) became more widespread. Since our 2018 state-of-the-art review assessing the pediatric telehealth landscape, there have been many changes in technology, policy, payment, and physician and patient acceptance of this care model. Clinical best practices in telehealth, on the other hand, have remained unchanged during this time, with the primary difference being the need to implement them at scale.Because of the pandemic, underlying health system weaknesses that have previously challenged telehealth adoption (including inequitable access to care, unsustainable costs in a fee-for-service system, and a lack of quality metrics for novel care delivery modalities) were simultaneously exacerbated. Higher volume use has provided a new appreciation of how patients from underrepresented backgrounds can benefit from or be disadvantaged by the shift toward virtual care. Moving forward, it will be critical to assess which COVID-19 telehealth changes should remain in place or be developed further to ensure children have equitable access to high-quality care.With this review, we aim to (1) depict today's pediatric telehealth practice in an era of digital disruption; (2) describe the people, training, processes, and tools needed for its successful implementation and sustainability; (3) examine health equity implications; and (4) critically review current telehealth policy as well as future policy needs. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is continuing to develop policy, specific practice tips, training modules, checklists, and other detailed resources, which will be available later in 2021.

Integrating telemedicine in urban pediatric primary care: provider perspectives and performance.

BACKGROUND: Health-e-Access, an urban telemedicine service, enabled 6,511 acute-illness telemedicine visits over a 7-year period for children at 22 childcare and school sites in Rochester, NY. OBJECTIVES: The aims of this article were to (1) describe provider attitudes and perceptions about efficiency and effectiveness of Health-e-Access and (2) assess hypotheses that (a) providers will complete a large proportion of the telemedicine visits attempted and (b) high levels of continuity with the primary care practice will be achieved. DESIGN/METHODS: This descriptive study focused on the 24-month Primary Care Phase in the development of Health-e-Access, initiated by the participation of 10 primary care practices. Provider surveys addressed efficiency, effectiveness, and overall acceptability. Performance measures included completion of telemedicine visits and continuity of care with the medical home. RESULTS: Among survey respondents, the 30 providers who had completed telemedicine visits perceived that decision-making required slightly less time and total time required was slightly greater than for in-person visits. Confidence in diagnosis was somewhat less for telemedicine visits. Providers were comfortable collaborating with telemedicine assistants and confident that communications met parent needs. Among the 2,554 consecutive telemedicine visits attempted during the Primary Care Phase, 2,475 (96.9%) were completed by 47 providers. For visits by children with a participating primary care practice, continuity averaged 83.2% among practices (range, 28.1-92.9%). CONCLUSIONS: Providers perceived little or no advantage in efficiency or effectiveness to their practice in using telemedicine to deliver care; yet they used it effectively in serving families, completing almost all telemedicine visits requested, providing high levels of continuity with the medical home, and believing they communicated adequately with parents.

Telemedicine in urban and suburban childcare and elementary schools lightens family burdens.

BACKGROUND: Acute illness challenges all families with young children. The Health-e-Access Telemedicine Network in Rochester, NY, has enabled >7,000 telemedicine visits since 2001 among children in childcare or elementary schools, predominantly from Rochester's inner city. Large reductions in illness-related absence and emergency department use among Health-e-Access participants have occurred. OBJECTIVE: The study was aimed to assess parent perception of telemedicine as a means to reduce burdens associated with childhood illness. DESIGN/METHODS: A total of 800 parents were surveyed before (578) or after (318) a child had at least one Health-e-Access visit. Queries addressed access to healthcare, conflicts between work/school and child's care during illness, and concerns and likes about telemedicine. Perceptions were elicited through open-ended and direct queries. RESULTS: Among all respondents, 16% had high-school education and 25% had a college education. Race/ethnicity of the respondents included black (43.6%), Hispanic (22.9%), white (30.0%), and other (3.5%). All identified a primary care practice as a source for well childcare. Most (58%) had given antipyretics to their child to avoid being called by childcare or elementary school staff about illness. Likert scale interview items addressing quality of care elicited low levels of worry or concern. Worry scores trended lower after experience. Among 532 comments about Health-e-Access elicited through open-ended probes, positive ones (likes) predominated (84.6%). Likes most commonly included convenience/time saved (33.6% of all comments), parent stayed at work (13.5%), drug delivered to child site (7.1%) or called ahead to pharmacy (4.9%), and confidence in care (2.3%). Negative responses (concerns) totaled 15.4% of comments and most commonly included reliability of diagnosis (2.6%), technical problems (1.3%), and preference for in-person care (0.8%). CONCLUSIONS: Health-e-Access was well accepted by a substantial, diverse group of parents despite unfamiliarity with this approach to care. Convenience and convenience-related experience dominated perceptions. This model enables service beyond that mandated by payers and beyond that generally provided by medical practices.

Differences in diagnosis and treatment using telemedicine versus in-person evaluation of acute illness.

OBJECTIVE: We designed a telemedicine model for diagnosis of common, acute illness to compare telemedicine and in-person evaluations on reproducibility of diagnosis and treatment. METHODS: Subjects were seen by usual physicians in ambulatory settings. Subjects were also evaluated separately by experienced general pediatricians (study physicians), either in person or via telemedicine, based on random assignment. The primary measure of reproducibility was study physician agreement with usual physician on primary diagnosis. Analysis compared reproducibility for telemedicine versus in-person evaluations. Relevance of agreement on primary diagnosis was measured by comparing agreement on prescribed medications. RESULTS: Agreement on diagnosis of study physicians with usual physicians for the 492 visits studied was 89%. The difference in the proportion of visits with disagreements between telemedicine study and in-person study evaluations (13.8% vs 8.3%, respectively) bordered on significance (P = .051). Disagreement proportions for prescriptions were similar (32.2% vs 27.4%), however. Telemedicine evaluation for children with upper respiratory tract (URI)-ear symptoms involved unique technical requirements and clinical judgments. For this largest subgroup of 202 visits, disagreement on diagnosis for telemedicine occurred more often than for in-person evaluation (17.6 vs 6.3%, P < .02). For the remaining 290 visits, telemedicine and in-person study physicians disagreed on diagnosis about equally (11.5 vs 9.9%). CONCLUSIONS: Excluding the URI-ear group, reproducibility of telemedicine diagnosis did not differ from that of in-person diagnosis. For the URI-ear group, reproducibility of diagnosis by telemedicine and in-person evaluation varied significantly.

Telemedicine and the patient-centered medical home.

Imagine an environment where health care coordination is seamless; where the pediatricians and their care teams could significantly reduce the time it takes to communicate and transfer the information between physicians, patients, and their families. Imagine a situation where unnecessary referrals and investigations are avoided, saving costs and anxieties for the patients. Welcome to the world of telemedicine and a patient-centered medical home (PCMH). Comprehensive health care delivered in the most efficient manner with the least expense is the cornerstone of these concepts. The concept of PCMH was first introduced in 1967 by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Council on Pediatric Practice in the book, Standards of Child Health Care. The medical home concept originally referred to one central source of medical records for children with special health care needs. During the past 4 decades, this concept has transformed beyond data entry to methods of delivering the best quality of care for all children. In 2007, a joint statement by the AAP, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, and the American Osteopathic Association endorsed the PCMH concept.

Acute illness care patterns change with use of telemedicine.

OBJECTIVE: Health-e-Access, a telemedicine service providing care for acute illnesses in children, has delivered >6500 telemedicine visits from 10 primary care practices in Rochester, New York, by using telemedicine access at 22 child care and school sites. The goal was to assess the hypotheses that children served by Health-e-Access received health care more often for acute illnesses but had fewer emergency department (ED) visits and lower health care expenditures than did children without access through this service. METHODS: By using insurance claims, this case study compared utilization (starting in May 2001) of telemedicine, office, or ED care for children with versus without telemedicine access. Children included in analyses had > or =6 consecutive insurance-covered months through July 2007. Claims data captured all utilization. A total of 19 652 child-months from 1216 children with telemedicine access were matched with respect to age, gender, socioeconomic status, and season with child-months for children without telemedicine availability. RESULTS: The mean age at utilization was 6.71 years, with 79% of all child-months being covered by Medicaid managed care. The overall utilization rate was 305.1 visits per 100 child-years. In multivariate analyses with adjustment for potential confounders, overall illness-related utilization rates (in-person or telemedicine visits per 100 child-years) for all sites were 23.5% greater for children with telemedicine access than for control children, but ED utilization was 22.2% less. CONCLUSION: The Health-e-Access telemedicine model holds potential to reduce health care costs, mostly through replacement of ED visits for nonemergency problems.

Acute illness utilization patterns before and after telemedicine in childcare for inner-city children: a cohort study.

The ready access provided by telemedicine benefits families and society but might increase total healthcare utilization with uncertain implications for costs. The objective of this study was to assess the net impact on healthcare utilization of introducing into inner-city childcare a telemedicine model designed to manage acute illness. A cohort study was done using comparable periods before and after introduction of telemedicine for all qualifying children (n = 112) using three innercity childcare centers. Because the utilization histories of these children differed in length, we chose child-months as the unit of analysis. Acute illness visits were ascertained for 1806 child-months among the 112 qualifying children. Following telemedicine startup, children's office and emergency department (ED) visits for illness fell by 1.73 and 0.20/child/year, respectively, replaced by telemedicine visits at 1.07/year. These observations could be misleading, however, because of the possibility of confounding factors. For example, the cohort aged during observation, and illness visits fall with age. Accordingly, in multivariate analysis we adjusted for season of the year, age, and within-child correlation. In this analysis, reduction in illness utilization overall tended toward an increase (rate ratio = 1.26, p = 0.13). The worst-case estimate (based on upper 95% confidence interval for rate ratio) for increase in illness utilization was 3.38 visits/child/year, and the most likely case was an increase of 1.26. Assuming (1) the worst-case effect (largest increase) on overall utilization and (2) reimbursement for ED, office, and telemedicine visits of 350 dollars, 45 dollars, and 45 dollars, respectively, the healthcare system would break even on telemedicine if it replaced 0.50 ED visits per child annually.

Effectiveness of telemedicine in replacing in-person evaluation for acute childhood illness in office settings.

For the purpose of reducing the social and economic burden imposed by common acute childhood illness, we developed a telemedicine model to enable diagnosis and treatment of illness episodes presenting in pediatric office settings. The study objective was to assess the effectiveness of this telemedicine model in replacing illness visits to traditional healthcare settings and to compare effectiveness of this model (base model) with that of alternative models including simple office laboratory tests and albuterol administration (simple model) or a complete complement of tests and procedures (extended model). Eligible subjects had an acute problem and were seen in the pediatric primary care practice or pediatric emergency department of the University of Rochester Medical Center. All subjects were seen by the setting's usual physician. Subjects were also evaluated, based on random assignment, by a study physician in person or by a study physician via telemedicine. Effectiveness was defined as completion of the visit to the point that diagnosis was made. Forms completed by study physicians, and standard medical records indicating the tests and procedures requested for the purpose of completing the visit, were used to identify the model used in completing the visit. Effectiveness (proportion of visits completed) of the base model was assessed and its effectiveness was compared to that of simple and extended telemedicine models. Among 520 randomized visits, 492 were evaluated by study physicians in person (253) or via telemedicine (239). Using the base model, study physicians completed 74.1% of visits via telemedicine compared to 76.7% for study physicians in person and 76.0% for usual physicians. The simple model increased completion rates substantially. Using this model, study physicians completed 84.9% of visits via telemedicine compared to 86.6% for study physicians in person and 85.2% for usual physicians. The extended model increased effectiveness in completing visits still more, with telemedicine study physicians completing 97.1% of visits compared to 96.8% for in-person study physicians and 100% for usual physicians. Approximately 85% of illness visits presenting to primary care pediatric practice could be completed using a telemedicine model that included only simple office laboratory testing and albuterol administration.

Telemedicine reduces absence resulting from illness in urban child care: evaluation of an innovation.

BACKGROUND: Common acute illness challenges everyone involved in child care. Impoverished inner-city families, whose children are most burdened by morbidity and whose reliance on child care is most important, are those least equipped to deal with this challenge. OBJECTIVE: To assess the impact of telemedicine on absence from child care due to illness (ADI). DESIGN/METHODS: A before-and-after design with historical and concurrent controls was used to study ADI in 5 inner-city child care centers in Rochester, New York, between January 1, 2001, and June 30, 2003. Enrollment averaged 138 children per center, of whom Medicaid covered 66%. Center 5 provided only concurrent controls. Telemedicine service began in the first 4 centers in a staggered fashion starting in May 2001. Baseline data on ADI before availability of telemedicine were collected in each center for a minimum of 18 weeks. The telemedicine model for diagnosis and treatment of common acute problems involved both real-time and store-and-forward information exchange between a child and telemedicine assistant in child care and an office-based telemedicine clinician. Devices used were an all-purpose digital camera (with attachments designed to facilitate capture of ear, nose, throat, skin, and eye images) and an electronic stethoscope. ADI indexed illness that had interrupted care and education for children and burdened both parents and the community with work loss and health care-related costs. Detailed attendance records and staff and parent interviews provided data. The total number of days of attendance expected from all registered children over the course of a week (total child-days) served as the denominator in calculating rates for ADI. The center-week served as the primary unit of analysis. This study is descriptive in character; statistics are not inferential but instead serve to summarize observations. RESULTS: For the 400 weeks of valid observations contributed by the 5 centers, the mean ADI was 6.41 absences per 100 child-days per week. In bivariate analysis, predictors of ADI were children's mean age, child care center, proportion of children covered by Medicaid, season of the year, and availability of telemedicine. ADI during weeks with telemedicine (4.07 absences per 100 child-days) was less than half that during weeks without telemedicine (8.78 absences per 100 child-days). After adjusting for potentially confounding variables using the generalized estimating equations method, telemedicine remained the strongest predictor of ADI. A 63% reduction in ADI was attributable to telemedicine, an effect similar to the 59% variation in ADI with season of the year. During the 201 total weeks that telemedicine services were available, 940 telemedicine encounters occurred. Telemedicine clinicians for these 940 encounters recommended exclusion from child care for 7.0% and in-person visits for 2.8% of the children. In surveys, parents indicated that 91.2% of telemedicine contacts allowed them to stay at work and that 93.8% of problems managed by telemedicine would otherwise have led to an office or emergency department visit. CONCLUSIONS: Telemedicine holds substantial potential to reduce the impact of illness on health and education of children, on time lost from work in parents, and on absenteeism in the economy.