Jones, EmilyCross-Barnet, Caitlin2024-10-282024-10-282023-12Jones, Emily, and Caitlin Cross-Barnet. “Telehealth as a Tool to Transform Pediatric Care: Views from Stakeholders.” Telemedicine and E-Health 29, no. 12 (December 2023): 1843–52. https://doi.org/10.1089/tmj.2022.0496.https://doi.org/10.1089/tmj.2022.0496http://hdl.handle.net/11603/36831Background and Objectives: The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic generated rapid telehealth expansion. Most prior telehealth studies focus on a single program or health condition, leaving a knowledge gap regarding the most appropriate and effective means of allocating telehealth services and funding. This research seeks to evaluate a wide range of perspectives to inform pediatric telehealth policy and practice.Methods: In 2017, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Innovation Center) issued a Request for Information to inform the Integrated Care for Kids model. Researchers identified 55 of 186 responses that addressed telehealth and analyzed them based on grounded theory principles overlaid with a constructivist approach to contextualize Medicaid policies, respondent characteristics, and implications for specific populations.Results: Respondents noted several health equity issues that telehealth could help to remedy, including timely care access, specialist shortages, transportation and distance barriers, provider-to-provider communication, and patient and family engagement. Implementation barriers reported by commenters included reimbursement restrictions, licensure issues, and costs of initial infrastructure. Respondents raised savings, care integration, accountability, and increased access to care as potential benefits.Discussion and Conclusions: The pandemic demonstrated that the health system can implement telehealth rapidly, although telehealth cannot be used to provide every aspect of pediatric care such as vaccinations. Respondents highlighted the promise of telehealth, which is heightened if telehealth supports health care transformation rather than replicating how in-office care is currently provided. Telehealth also offers the potential to increase health equity for some populations of pediatric patients.29 pagesen-USThis is the original submission version (pre-peer review) of the following article: Jones, Emily, and Caitlin Cross-Barnet. “Telehealth as a Tool to Transform Pediatric Care: Views from Stakeholders.” Telemedicine and E-Health 29, no. 12 (December 2023): 1843–52. https://doi.org/10.1089/tmj.2022.0496, which has now been formally published in final form at Telemedicine and E-Health at https://doi.org/10.1089/tmj.2022.0496. This original submission version of the article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers’ self-archiving terms and conditions.Text