Telehealth's Role Expands Beyond Mental Health Care
A University of Utah Health study finds that telehealth is being used effectively for a wide range of health services, not just therapy or medication management. This normalization cements its role as an accessible and flexible delivery mode for skills-based interventions, including executive function coaching and parent training.
- While overall telehealth use has stabilized since its peak, it remains 38 times higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic was a significant catalyst, with one study showing a 766% increase in telehealth interactions in the first three months of the public health emergency. - Beyond psychiatry, which has the highest adoption, other specialties increasingly rely on telehealth, including endocrinology, neurology, and gastroenterology. In 2024, 71.4% of all physicians reported working in practices that used telehealth, a substantial increase from 25.1% in 2018. - The management of chronic diseases is a significant area of telehealth expansion, with more than 80% of healthcare providers using some form of the technology for chronic care. Remote patient monitoring has been shown to reduce hospital readmissions by up to 50% for conditions like heart failure and diabetes. - Studies specifically on telehealth for children with ADHD show that parent coaching delivered remotely can lead to statistically significant improvements in the children's executive functions and the parents' own sense of self-efficacy. - Virtual executive function coaching offers unique advantages, such as the ability to work on goals "live" and in context. For example, a coach can help a student organize their actual digital or physical workspace through screen sharing or a device's camera, providing real-time feedback. - Research into telehealth-delivered parent training for children with autism spectrum disorder shows that parents can be trained to implement naturalistic teaching strategies with high fidelity. This leads to measurable improvements in children's social communication skills. - For ADHD management, studies show equivalent effectiveness between telehealth and in-person care regarding medication response rates, symptom improvement, and patient satisfaction scores. - Telehealth has proven effective for delivering parent-mediated interventions for children with ASD, with some programs showing parents achieved an average skill gain of 80.9% and a knowledge gain of 35.3%.
