Telehealth Initiative Aims to Provide Virtual Care in GA School Settings

The Harris County School District in Georgia recently began a partnership with Mercer Medicine to implement a telehealth initiative to increase access to healthcare for students and school employees, reducing absences and education gaps.

Traditionally, to attend healthcare appointments and consultations, students and faculty members within school systems must depart from the premises and travel to a clinical office setting. Considering that some healthcare locations are upwards of 30 minutes away, this process can often take several hours, the press release notes.

In addition to time-related issues, the press release also stated that absences from school are known to correlate strongly with student achievement.

To combat this issue, the Harris County School District began a telehealth partnership with Mercer Medicine on Jan. 31. The school district aims to expand access to care for its population of over 5,600 students and 900 employees.

Morgan Marlowe, a community development coordinator for the Harris County School District, also noted in the press release that the idea of a school-based clinic was appealing as it could allow students to remain in school and eliminate travel issues for parents.

After a student or employee visits the school nurse, they are scheduled for a virtual appointment with Mercer Medicine if needed. This comes with the requirement of parental approval in care involving students. Further, parents can join the appointment virtually.

The appointments consist of a nurse taking vital signs through a telehealth workstation and conducting other exams suggested by clinicians at a primary care clinic opened last year by Mercer Medicine, the faculty practice of Mercer University School of Medicine. Through this initiative, nurses have access to specialized equipment.

“We’re on the other end able to visualize all of the exam, interview the student, and then we come up with a disposition, diagnosis and treatment plan,” said David Kay, MD, who leads health services at the primary care clinic, in a press release. “This medical equipment is high-definition camera systems that honestly give me a much better picture than if I was sitting in front of the patient. When I do an ear exam on a child, you often can only see a small portion of the eardrum (in person), but with these high-definition cameras, they can place the otoscope in the ear, and now you’ve got a magnified image of the eardrum.”

In addition to the technological capabilities of these virtual appointments, the initiative also allows providers to call prescriptions into a pharmacy, usually the location across the street from the primary care clinic.

The press release also noted that providers can leverage previously created charts for all students, which are accessible in the Mercer Medicine EHR system for telehealth visits.

Additionally, the program benefits high school students with medical aspirations. The initiative allows these students to shadow nurses within schools rather than traveling to faraway locations.

Similarly, a partnership between OU Health and Oklahoma City Public Schools that began in November 2022 aimed to provide care services and integrated health education programs through a school-based telehealth program.

Through the program, public schools gained access to telehealth software along with diagnostic devices that allowed OU Health providers to conduct virtual health examinations within school settings.