Avera eCare is receiving more than 4 million dollars to develop a national telehealth certificate program. The grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust will help standardize the quality of virtual healthcare.
The $4.3 million grant expands on a previous one-year planning grant to Avera eCare that focused on tele-psychiatry —or, providing behavioral health services remotely through video calls.
Mandy Bell is the eCare Innovation Officer with Avera Health. She explains this new project has a much bigger scope on incorporating telehealth in medical practices. Any health professional can take the resulting online classes and receive the telehealth certificate after 8-12 hours of training.
Bell says telehealth is an answer to the age-old question of getting healthcare resources where they’re needed most. For instance, Bell says most specialty medical practices in South Dakota are either in Sioux Falls or Rapid City.
“So telehealth helps bridge those gaps and allows folks to get the care they need no matter where they’re located—or whether it’s at night, or they’re in their home, or at the hospital—wherever that may be,” she explains.
But it’s not as simple as bringing a Skype call into the hospital room. Bell says Avera eCare has spent the last two and a half decades improving call security and communication between sites to prevent gaps in care. This grant will help Avera compile that experience into a first-of-its-kind curriculum.
Bell says the first step now is convening an expert panel of telehealth professionals around the nation to identify best practices.
“The results should be a set of objectives that everyone agrees are the gold standard of what should be available for telehealth training,” says Bell.
She expects those standards to be published after a peer-review process in about a year.
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