Telehealth Gives Providers a Platform to Treat Children With Special Needs

With the Coronavirus pandemic shutting down nearly every school in the country, parents of  children with special needs are turning to telehealth to maintain access to critical services.

An example of this are early intervention programs, which are often state-funded and aim to provide developmental and therapeutic services to the roughly 17 percent of American children with at least one developmental disability. Many work with schools, day cares and other child care sites to fit therapy into the schedule, and they’re using telemedicine to make that easier.

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“We’re providing services to a lot of people over a large area,” says Tracie Lopez, the early intervention lead coordinator for Colorado-based Blue Peaks Developmental Services. “This is meaningful care, (focusing on) development and growth. With telehealth, we’re able to fill in the gaps and help a lot of families who are struggling to access these services.”

“It all comes down to access, which is very important” to this population, says Syed Mohammed, CEO of Enable My Child, a New York-based provider of pediatric teletherapy services to local and state programs across the country. “Telehealth allows us to reach out to more children and families and to give them a level of comfort they need.”

“For the last 30 or 40 years we’ve been doing therapy face-to-face,” he adds. “Healthcare is inexpensive and inconvenient, and you don’t always get what you want. This … gives us a chance to” change the dynamic and adapt to the needs of families who really need the help.

An online platform gives care providers the opportunity to develop home-based care programs that reduce the stress of travel for families. It also allows the provider to document the care, even capturing sessions on video, to chart progress and amend the care plan as needed.

For families of children with developmental disabilities, disruptions in the schedule can be chaotic, affecting both the family and the child’s progress. A connected health program gives those families and their care providers more of an opportunity to maintain a regular schedule – particularly now that the pandemic has closed many clinics and severely restricted travel.

Mohammed says Enable My Child has seen a four-to-sixfold increase in daily volume for its teletherapy services since the pandemic took hold of the nation, and it has caused many state programs to rethink their focus on home visits.

“To address the lack of home visits right now, we’ve offered states access to our therapy delivery and management platform so they can onboard their own therapists,” he says. “This isn't something we've made available in the past since our core offering is the services provided by our therapist network, but we wanted to ensure EI centers can continue serving children and families without any interruption of services.”

This kind of thinking is showing up in many corners of the market. Specialists who are treating children diagnosed with autism, for example, are expanding their programs online to work with more children in the comfort of their own homes, tailor programs to a child’s specific needs and give families an opportunity to received care without traveling to an office or clinic.

“The need for social distancing is forcing healthcare providers, as well as their customers, to look at alternative mediums to distribute and receive services,” Mohammed adds. “Telehealth platforms and services like ours are offering those alternatives. Once healthcare providers begin to deliver their services online, they’ll notice that they can offer care more efficiently, cost-effectively, and more intelligently because of technology.”