In 2016, the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP) funded 21 grantees through the School-Based Telehealth Network Grant Program (SB TNGP) to expand access to, and coordinate and improve the quality of, healthcare services offered in schools. Grants were targeted to rural, frontier, and underserved communities providing telehealth services for children, with a focus on five clinical areas: asthma, behavioral health, diabetes, healthy weight, and oral health. The Rural Telehealth Research Center (RTRC) worked with FORHP and the grantees to identify a set of measures applicable to these service areas in school settings, as well as measures of access to care and cost effectiveness. RTRC then identified data elements, and developed a data element dictionary and an Excel-based data collection tool. The grantees used these resources to submit data on all of their telehealth encounters funded through the SB TNGP during six-month measurement periods starting July 1, 2018.

Data collected thus far from SB TNGP grantees have revealed that there is considerable heterogeneity across the SB TNGP grantees in terms of the types of telehealth services they are delivering, the number of students who have received services to date, and their performance on the identified SB TNGP measures.

The principal goal of this project is to gather contextual information from grantees regarding project design and implementation, and the practicalities of delivering telehealth services in school settings that will help explain the heterogeneity found in the data across the grantees. This information will aid in the interpretation of findings of cross-grantee measures data collection that will inform future grant-making, policy changes and sustainability efforts.

Publications

• Implementation of Telehealth Services in Rural Schools: A Qualitative Assessment
  Journal Article
  Rural Telehealth Research Center
  Date: 11/2021
  This study explores facilitators and barriers to implementation of telehealth programs in rural schools and identifies strategies for successful implementation to inform future school-based telehealth initiatives. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 50 key personnel involved in the School-Based Telehealth Network Grant Program.