Telehealth Resources

To engage diverse community stakeholders in ways to advance school-based telemedicine and promote broad community supports for families.

• Recruit and retain wide range of family and child-serving system representatives to inform project activities, reinforce collaborative efforts, identify community resources, and work toward sustainability.
• Utilize broad community advisory group for input with ongoing and emergent concerns related to the school-based telemedicine services.
• Hold full group engagement meetings at least twice each year, with subcommittee meetings based on specific goals/deliverables with options to meet in person or via telehealth.
• Promote two-generation perspectives and gather resources from broad groups (e.g., housing, employment, TANF, education, adult healthcare) to build a supportive environment for the student receiving telehealth services.
• Explore community priorities through the CHA/CHIP and other needs assessment processes in order to identify additional potential services using school-based telemedicine, including asthma, oral health, diabetes management, concussion and other supports.

Following telemental health best practices, increase evidenced-based assessment, treatment, and adherence interventions for behavioral health and obesity.

• With school site and advisory group input, adapt telemedicine protocols across assessment, treatment and adherence for the range of behavioral health and obesity intervention with school-age population (K-12).
• Provide training and ongoing support to telemedicine coordinators and telefacilitators, including opportunities to shadow existing telefacilitators.
• Complete monthly videoconferencing calls among the telemedicine coordinators and telefacilitators to encourage “lessons learned”; invite speakers based on regional sites’ interests and needs.
• Provide evidenced-based telemedicine assessment, treatment and adherence interventions.
• Across key groups (families, rural personnel, providers), complete process measures associated with treatment over telemedicine, consistent with RE-AIM evaluation framework.
• Gather follow-up information across participating sites concerning barriers and facilitators, then seek additional behavioral and obesity services along with other pediatric services via telemedicine to meet the needs.
• Explore expansion of telemedicine services to support two generation health needs

Utilizing a range of distance education delivery approaches including Project ECHO, increase mentoring continuing education and opportunities for school-based telemedicine personnel.

• Complete ongoing need assessment with school-based health center and broader school personnel to identify educational topics of interest.
• Adapt behavioral and obesity management curriculum.
• Complete ECHO accreditation for educational credits including CME (Continuing Medical Education), CNE (Certified Nurse Educator), and CE (Continuing Education).
• Train the hub team in the ECHO telementoring approach, including completion of a “mock” ECHO.
• Train spoke sites in the ECHO approach and provide case templates for the de-identified case presentations.
• Complete bi-monthly ECHO sessions and archive content for review, and evaluate.

To adapt the 12345 Fit-tastic healthy weight collaborative approach for the rural Kansas audience and use telehealth to implement across rural school partners.

• Adapt and continuously improve the Fit-tastic collaborative approach and materials for the rural setting, drawing on input from the advisory group and experts in obesity, school-based services and rural health.
• Recruit, support, and retain Fit-tastic teams from the target rural schools and their communities.
• Liaise with pediatric obesity experts to provide telehealth presentations and support (the two) cohorts using videoconferencing.
• Implement Fit-tastic distance educational events, including the broader community educational events.
• Ongoing retention efforts and data collection from internal team personnel and from collaborative teams.
• Provide ongoing technical support, both in person and by video, around quality improvement strategies.

To support student participation in Telehealth ROCKS Schools activities across the workforce pipeline.

• Recruit health professional trainees to participate across project activities: Engagement, Services, Education/Mentoring, and Prevention.
• Gather feedback from trainee experiences and continue to improve the telemedicine experiences.
• Participate in AHEC (Area Health Education Centers) health careers promotions activities around the behavioral health and obesity intervention careers, emphasizing telehealth.