Georgia Lawmakers to Consider Telehealth Expansion in Schools

A Georgia lawmaker has submitted a bill that aims to develop telehealth programs in the state’s schools to help students with mental and behavioral health concerns.

HB 9, introduced last month by State Rep. Sandra Scott, would have the Georgia Department of Education collaborate with the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities to create a statewide model for telemental health services in schools and for school-related functions. It would also help individual schools establish suicide prevention policies.

“Our students have dealt with an unprecedented public health crisis that has left many of them isolated and quarantined at home away from their school community,” Scott said in a press release issued this week. “Therefore, it is imperative that we bring a service to the students that can help them cope with anxiety, depression and other mood-altering problems, and that service is telehealth. Providing these innovative and flexible mental health resources is more important than it has ever been.”

The bill defines telehealth to include “telephones, remote patient monitoring devices, or other electronic means to facilitate the assessment, diagnosis, consultation, treatment, education, care management, and self-management of a student's health care when the health care provider is at a remote location and the student is at a school or is participating in any school related function.”

It’s one of many being introduced in states aimed at dealing with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic through improved access to and coverage of connected health services. It also addresses the surge in depression and anxiety caused by the COVID-19 crisis.

Georgia is among the leaders in states using telehealth to tackle behavioral health issues in the schools.

In 2017, spurred by a state report that indicated roughly half of the state’s 159 counties have no licensed child psychologist, the state’s Commission on Children’s Mental Health issued a report with five recommendations to address the lack of child-based mental health services. One recommendation was that the state make more use of telemedicine.

“Kids who have an unmet mental health need, if it continues to get worse, miss significantly more days of school than kids who don’t have those needs,” Erica Fener Sitkoff, executive director of Voices for Georgia’s Children and a commission member, said at the time. “We know if we don’t intervene, it starts to have a compounding negative impact on them - they get behind and it feeds into stress, anxiety, depression.”

COVID-19 made the situation worse, forcing children to not only deal with the pandemic, but closed schools, virtual learning and upheaval in their social lives.