Knowledge Knugget: Telemental Health: 10 Benefits and Use Cases

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Welcome to this week’s healthcare Knowledge Knugget! Today, we will be talking about the 10 Telemental Health Benefits and Use Cases. Watch the video to learn more about how people are using telemental health and some very specific uses cases?

Mental Health
How can telemental health reduce those no show rates? It allows you to look at somebody that's coming in for therapy sessions once a week, whatever it may be and allowing them for certain times and appointment times to be able to do that through video telehealth.

Senior Care
A lot of seniors are going through mental health issues and they don't know how to explain it. Being able to do video appointments in the comfort of their own home and talking to them about things like depression or anxiety from retiring or being in isolation.

Youth Mental Health
Attending an in-person youth mental health appointment is a double-edged sword. With telehealth technology and telemental technology being browser-based, the school doesn't have to buy any expensive hardware or software.

Foster Care
Children that are in foster care are on Medicaid and it's very hard given the guidelines of foster care for foster parents to be able to take off work or even get somebody to give the foster child a ride to mental health appointments.

Medicaid Access
The last one in this bucket of youth is Medicaid access. Normally it is very hard to get a Medicaid appointment for mental health. If you're a mental health professional with a private practice and you're not taking Medicaid, you should look at the reimbursement, you might reconsider and it can help for youth and population health and even seniors.

Rural Health
The next use case is rural health. There's a lot of shortage areas. And so reaching those rural areas where people are driving an hour and a half, two hours to appointments to rule in community hospitals for mental health, um, is as a big area.

Facilities Using Virtual Care
So a lot of your rural and community hospitals don't have enough mental health professionals on staff and they can't give people to live in those rural areas.

Psych Evaluations
There's a lot of shortage of being able to get that immediate psych eval, whether it's a treatment facility and it's an admission that you needed, whether it's a foster care system, whether it's a rural community hospital, there's a large shortage in psych.

Follow-up Appointments
Whether the patient is discharged from the hospital and you're putting it on the patient to then go find a mental health professional or your jotting down some names or giving a sheet to go get a mental health professional, there's a big breakage in that happening.

Treatment Facilities
All the telemental health that goes on in a substance abuse treatment facility daily, weekly, whether you're in 30, 60, 90-day rehab and you're getting discharged, you build this relationship with that mental health professional and now you're kind of out on your own.

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Download our latest telemental white paper and listen to the healthcare podcasts where we talk about all the use cases for telehealth.