Telehealth News

Florida OKs New Telehealth Law, Eyes New Services For School Children

Just one day after signing expansive new telehealth guidelines into law, Florida's First Family announced plans to create a telemental health network to treat tens of thousands of school children affected by Hurricane Michael.

Source: ThinkStock

By Eric Wicklund

- Just one day after signing off on new telehealth legislation, Florida’s First Family is putting connected health to work to help thousands of public school students dealing with behavioral health issues in the wake of Hurricane Michael.

First Lady Casey DeSantis this week announced plans to create a telemental health network so that more than 35,000 students in the Florida panhandle would have on-demand access to virtual care when they return to school this fall.  

The five-county region in the northwest part of the state was hard hit by the Category 5 storm in 2018.

“Helping our children heal from the trauma and stress of Hurricane Michael is a critical element in rebuilding our communities and creating resilient families,” Chad Poppell, Secretary of the state Department of Children and Families, said during a press event Wednesday morning in Callaway, a suburb of Panama City. “By ensuring every student has access to mental health services, I’m confident that we will not only recover from Michael, but also move forward to ensure our children reach their full potential.”

It’s part of a much larger disaster recovery program that includes $2.3 million sent to the Department of Children and Families through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to increase outreach services and pay crisis counselors through 2020, and $1.25 million from the federal Department of Education for Bay County’s school district to add licensed social workers and paraprofessionals to each school campus.

According to news reports, as much as 40 percent of the healthcare providers in the region have lost employees since the storm, adding to an already-noticeable provider shortage. In addition, hundreds of children have been referred to mental health services for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and other after-effects of the storm.

Officials fear many of those children aren’t getting the care they need because their parents can’t find providers, or the children have stopped going to scheduled appointments with summer at hand. This new program would give those children access to care at school through a telemedicine platform tied to an available provider network.

The announcement came just one day after Gov. DeSantis signed into law a sweeping new telehealth bill that, among other things, establishes new guidelines for telehealth and telemedicine and allows payers and providers to collaborate on reimbursement.

The new law, which takes effect July 1, also allows healthcare providers in other states to use telemedicine to treat Florida residents as long as they register with the state. This requirement will not apply to out-of-state providers using telehealth for emergency care or those coordinating care with an in-state provider who has authority over that patient’s care.

And it creates a new definition for telehealth that includes asynchronous, or store-and-forward, platforms but does not include audio-only phone calls, e-mails or faxes.

“We are going to provide the quality, cost, access and delivery of health care in Florida in the most efficient way using the 21st Century technology,” State Senator Gayle Harrell, R-Stuart, told the Orlando Sentinel shortly before the Senate vote in May to approve the bill. “We really have been a little behind the curve here in Florida, in really expanding the use of something that is so, so important.”

Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
©2012-2024 TechTarget, Inc. Xtelligent Healthcare Media is a division of TechTarget. All rights reserved. HealthITAnalytics.com is published by Xtelligent Healthcare Media a division of TechTarget.