Telemedicine brings doctors to Indian Health hospitals with recruitment challenges

A variety of telehealth counseling options throughout several Midwestern states are helping connect farmers with mental health clinicians. One option is online training, specifically targeted towards engaged couples and newlyweds, that teaches best practices for farming basics and managing communication and stress – already 1,500 people have enrolled in the course.

In Syria, medical personnel are at risk of death as hospitals are frequent targets of bombing. With few medical specialists treating an assortment of injuries and diseases under the most dangerous circumstances, doctors began an underground network. This network installs cameras in hospital rooms to send pictures over mobile media to doctors abroad, doctors working on-site change their names, and animal waste powers the operations.

Fifty-one counties in the state of Wisconsin do not have child psychiatrists to provide counseling because most of them live in widely populated urban areas. Wisconsin psychiatrists now are offering telepsychiatry, which enables young people to do video conferencing and live chatting with a psychiatrist even if they are in rural areas. The program has shown that it is just as effective as in-person treatment; however, Wisconsin does not allow private insurers to pay for telemedicine services so the reimbursement for telepsychiatrists is still problematic.

Project ECHO - driven by a single doctor with a cause - pulled together a team of specialists to develop a model that combines technology with collaborative care and careful patient tracking to help cure for diseases spread to patients around the world through community healthcare agents, as opposed to only specialty centers. This kind of "disruptive innovation" is effectively working to demonopolize health care knowledge and access, and lends to a health system capable of meeting today’s soaring demands for care.

In Montana, the transition to telehealth during the Covid-19 pandemic has helped one health care clinic provide care for more patients than before the virtual visits were necessary. Although it's not yet determined if this model of care will be sustainable in the longterm because of insurance protocols, it has allowed for the clinic to hire more practitioners due in part to health insurance relaxing telehealth reimbursement regulations. Other health agencies have also found similar benefits from the transition of care.

Philadelphia medical centers had to pivot their services in response to COVID-19, turning to telehealth to screen patients who think they’re experiencing symptoms. That pivot took some adjusting – having to hire and train staff in the technology and process and scaling their services to meet the massive spike in online appointments. Doing so has let places like Jefferson Health and Penn Medicine see close to 10x the patients they usually see.

Wisconsin confronts a lack of psychiatrists, in particular those who specialize in working with children. The state has begun a telepsychiatry program that enables a psychiatrist to counsel children in remote rural areas. By using webcams, the program has succeeded at eliminating travel time for psychiatrists and appropriating resources to directly and quickly serve those who need them.

The Zipline drone system helps deliver life-saving medical supplies, such as blood and antivenom, to areas in the country that are hard to reach due to issues with the terrain, infrastructure or extreme weather. Since launching, Zipline has made more than one million deliveries.

The Behavioral Health Urgent Care and Access Center at Integrated Services of Kalamazoo (ISK) works with local law enforcement to assist those experiencing mental health crises and divert them from having to visit emergency rooms or face incarceration. The ISK Center offers same-day treatment for substance abuse as well as mental health care. In the Center’s first month, they received 19,619 calls for service from the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Department, 2% of which were flagged as behavioral health calls.

Emergency Response Africa connects patients with first responders, ambulances and emergency-ready hospitals so they can get the care they need as quickly as possible. A 24-hour command center that can be reached by phone or mobile app dispatches the emergency response team of trained paramedics, which then brings the patient to one of the 82 verified emergency hospitals. Since it was established in 2021, Emergency Response Africa has received 1,243 emergency calls.