Introduction and Overview
I am excited to speak with you today and to share my passion with telehealth. I've been involved with telehealth now for many years and have experienced firsthand how effective it can be as a service delivery model in occupational therapy.
First, I wanted to share a little bit about how my journey in telehealth began. I have been a pediatric occupational therapy practitioner for about 16 years, and my career in pediatrics started in early intervention. I was traveling out to different counties, working with children, and I quickly realized that there was an access barrier for children to get the services that they needed. In addition, my own daughter went through early intervention services (PT, OT, and speech therapy). As a parent, I realized how important and life-changing those services are. The idea that there could be barriers preventing my child from receiving beneficial services propelled me to want to explore a solution.
About that same time, I was working on my doctorate degree. While taking classes, it was common practice for us to connect with our professors remotely through video conferencing technologies. I was amazed at how quickly you forget that you are communicating through technology. You see the other person and you are just having a conversation. I started thinking about the fact that many of the services we provide in early intervention do not require us to physically touch the child. It involves a lot of education and empowerment, and teaching the caregiver how to engage the child and to implement therapeutic strategies into their daily routines. It just made sense to me that these interventions could be done using some of these technologies, particularly in the instances where children might not otherwise have any other access to OT services.
That's how my journey started. I was fortunate to get a community-based grant from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky. That grant launched my whole path into investigating telehealth, and becoming an advocate for its use in occupational therapy. I was able to write up the early work that I did around the pilot developing a telerehabilitation program, implementing it, and evaluating it. Since then, I have been able to build on that early work.
More recently, I've had a wonderful opportunity to get back on the front lines of telehealth, working with school-aged children. Again, my early work was in early intervention (birth to three), and so it was a newer experience for me to then work with older children using telehealth technologies. I quickly found that it works equally well with this age group. Rather than coaching the parents, as I did with the early intervention model, I find that I'm doing a lot of direct intervention with the school-aged children.
There are many digital tools and resources available to occupational therapy practitioners. When I'm engaging children with handwriting curriculums, I have been using the Handwriting Without Tears materials and the digital teaching tools that are available. I can pull up on my screen the animation of letter formations so that the child will have a visual model with the words. These digital resources create a rich intervention environment with the children.
I'm also finding terrific applications with evaluation. Many publishers are starting to develop online assessments for OT practitioners. One of the assessments that I've been using is through the publisher's HIPAA compliant platform. The families can complete the questionnaire, autoscore it and generate a report through the publisher’s platform. Other publishers are doing the same. The Sensory Profile 2 has also been developed so that it can be administered online. I think we're going to see more of that in the future with publishers not only developing assessment tools that are administered online, but also tools that can be conducive to a telehealth delivery model.
In short, I'm finding that many activities that I would do in person with my clients, I have been able to, with the help of a parent or a caregiver or a teacher on the other end, implement those same interventions remotely and have very successful therapy encounters.
