Knowledge Knugget: Telemental Health: 10 Benefits and Use Cases

02/13/20 • 8 min

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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.

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Previous Episode

Filling Your Belly with Culture: In-Depth with Potbelly

Welcome to the Executive Innovation Show Podcast, brought to you by Live Video Interviews. During this podcast, hear host, Carrie Chitsey, talk with Matt Revord of Potbelly Sandwich Works.

Matt Revord has been with Potbelly for 14 years in various roles including Chief Legal Officer and Chief People Officer.

Listen to “Filling Your Belly with Culture: In-Depth with Potbelly” as we discuss:

Matt Revord gives us the breakdown of the very unique beginnings of Potbelly Sandwich Works. Did you know that it started as an antique store? Listen as we learn about the concept of Potbelly and its rise in popularity across the United States to becoming a publicly-traded company in 2013.
Now operating in over 470 units in 34 states with over 7,000 employees, the question becomes “How do you maintain culture through growth?” Since being part of the Potbelly team in 2007 and now the Chief People Officer, Matt Revord gives his insight into the importance of company culture.
Potbelly Sandwich Works is known for having awesome employees. Has maintaining culture through growth been a critical success factor to their scale? Matt maps out how the importance of company culture started and has evolved over the years with new executive team members.
What are some of the things that define Potbelly’s culture? Allowing employees to maintain their own unique sense of style. Who doesn’t want to wear tye-dye t-shirts over uniforms? Hear about the tribal knowledge that grew with each new store.
What is a culture statement? Does your company really need one? Listen to why the new CEO, Aylwin Lewis, requested one from Matt. This led to the creation of “The Potbelly Advantage”. Did this help cement the importance of company culture and create a daily reminder for their teams?
When a company grows how do you maintain culture through growth? Is it from the top down? Matt Revord talks about how strong CEO leadership and commitment to culture allows Potbelly to be successful, with lower turnover rates and higher customer satisfaction scores.
How has Potbelly stood out against the clutter in a low unemployment market?
As a Chief People Officer, how has Matt been able to keep things consistent on the talent acquisition side find the culture fit in recruiting new employees? He gives his tips on recruiting for culture fit and maintaining culture through growth in recruiting across many geographies.
Matt admits that they may be losing great candidates due to their interview process. He explains why he’s okay with that. With an estimate of the cost of losing an hourly employee between two and four thousand dollars and a manager $12-15,000, he encourages his manager to look for quality, not quantity. While today’s generations are looking for speed to hire, employers have to maintain their quality in the interview process.
With Gen Z being the majority in the hospitality job demographics, what trends has Matt Revord seen in hiring? They’ve moved to video training and seeing significantly better success with GenZ’s.
It’s time for a game! Carrie and Matt play “Word Association”. Hear Matt’s first word that comes to mind for all kinds of fun HR terminology.
What’s Matt’s go to Potbelly sandwich? And hear about their new sandwich, the BLTA.
Matt answers our favorite question – “What keeps you up at night?”.

Download the White Paper, “Reach & Recruit a Passive Front-Line Talent Pool” to learn more about how to recruit and hire for culture fit.

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Knowledge Knugget: Telemedicine Prenatal Care

Read the blog here.
Welcome to this week’s healthcare Knowledge Knugget! As a part of “The Executive Innovation Show” podcast, we’re bringing you the hot topics, questions we receive each week and game-changing ideas, best practices and tips. Today’s topic comes from Dr. Valentine Ugwu. He is going to talk about specific use cases of telemedicine in prenatal care.
Dr. Valentine Ugwu is an OBGYN -Full Fellow of American College of OBGYN’s (ACOG) and a Board-Certified Primary Care Physician. Also, he has a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA). His health care experience spans about 23-years.

Listen and or watch the Knowledge Knugget above as Dr. Valentine Ugwu answers the following questions discussing the benefits of telemedicine for prenatal care:

How can telemedicine in prenatal care help rural areas to have more frequent visits with patients?

Pregnancy should be a wonderful time for a mother and her unborn baby but can be challenging without the support and medical care needed as can be provided with prenatal care.

This becomes even more of a concern with the limited access to care that comes with the rural areas. It is no news that since 2010 to date, approximately 1 in 5 hospitals in rural communities across the country have closed due to limited funding, migrating population to urban areas amongst other issues. To get the access they must travel long distances in most circumstances. These issues of course impact this important population ”pregnant women” gravely as they are starved of care and become open to dire complications as their only options are showing up in the emergency room where most physicians are not trained to offer care to them and the only option is to have them “flown“ out of the facility.

Promoting telehealth will help ease these pressures as women can use their mobile devices to communicate with providers like myself for remote access to prenatal care.

Also teaching them to measure their weights, blood pressures, growth of their pregnancy with tape measurements, and listening to their baby’s heart using a device.

Of course, this is only applicable to pregnancies considered low risk (which is most pregnancies). High-risk pregnancies and low-risk pregnancies determined to have eventual concerns on virtual visits will warrant physical evaluations.

You work servicing the border and surrounding areas as a physician, how much windshield time do you spend per week or month driving to locations?

Given my passion for women’s health and rural medicine, I do work in the border environment and commit an average of 10-12 hours a week ensuring I travel to deliver care to my population.

If an average telemedicine prenatal care appointment is 4 to 7 mins, describe the benefits as a physician being in one location seeing more patients. (Video relationship and patient convenience, not missing appointments, compliance). What is most beneficial in your mind?

In my opinion patient inconvenience (Lack of transport to nearest facilities or finances) is one of the most challenging reasons for patient’s noncompliance with prenatal care. So, to be able to bridge this gap with telehealth has unquantifiable benefits. It does also help the physician reduce burnout with travel and the hazards of long-distance traveling when not needed.

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Download our playbook where we define "What is Telehealth?".

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