Program Description

Background

The New Hampshire Area Health Education Center (AHEC), North Country Health Consortium, and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) sponsored a two-day conference entitled "Telehealth New Hampshire: Technology in Practice" in June 2004 to raise interest, knowledge, and awareness of Telehealth applications in New Hampshire, and to explore the possibility of forming a statewide telehealth collaborative. One of the conference outcomes was that a group of conference attendees, people representing health care organizations in New Hampshire (the original Planning Committee), decided that the next step was to publish a white paper as a guide to help New Hampshire plan and implement its own statewide telehealth system. Planning and Implementing a Statewide Telehealth Program in New Hampshire is available at the Endowment for Health's website.

Where We are Now

The Endowment for Health has funded a planning grant so that the NHTP Planning Committee and core NHTP staff are able to work on projects that will lead toward developing a collaborative statewide Telehealth program.

During the planning phase, the following will be addressed:

  • Need/readiness for telehealth in New Hampshire
  • Review of existing and available data on NH demographics, health status, and access issues
  • Inventory of existing Telehealth programs in the State
  • Inventory existing equipment, connections, protocols, and staff at existing telehealth programs statewide
  • Identify at least 2 pilot projects that might be implemented
  • Identify/incorporate "best practices" from successful Telehealth programs in other states
  • Develop and maintain NHTP website
  • Investigate reimbursement for services provided using Telehealth
  • Increase awareness of NHTP by presenting/discussing the Program at professional meetings
  • Identify funding sources for continued planning and implementation
  • Develop evaluation plan

Where we Plan to Go

In order to develop a comprehensive sustainable program to meet New Hampshire's needs, the following steps will be followed:

  • Create grids of care needs with information from needs assessment, determine "hub" and "spoke" locations
  • Seek multiple sources of funding to allow for a robust, dynamic network
  • Evaluate the NHTP
  • Implement pilot projects
  • Continue working with existing and newly identified partners using the Planning Model (pdf).