Publications by authors named "Jonathan D Neufeld"

Background: Medicare policy regarding telemedicine reimbursement has changed little since 2000. Many individual states, however, have added telemedicine reimbursement for either Medicaid and/or commercial payers over the same period. Because telemedicine programs must serve patients from all or most payers, it is likely that these state-level policy changes have significant impacts on telemedicine program viability and utilization of services from all payers, not just those services and payers affected directly by state policy.

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Background: Medicare has been one of the principal payers for healthcare services delivered via telemedicine to rural beneficiaries since 1997. Early projections of the cost of covering telemedicine for Medicare beneficiaries made legislators cautious to take on such a large obligation, but subsequent reports showed actual expenditures to be far below early estimates. As interest in expanding Medicare's coverage for services delivered via telemedicine grows, further examination of the extent of telemedicine use within the Medicare program and the costs associated with this use is warranted.

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Introduction: Mentally ill patients in crisis presenting to critical access hospital emergency rooms often face exorbitant wait times to be evaluated by a trained mental health provider. Patients may be discharged from the hospital before receiving an evaluation or boarded in a hospital bed for observation, reducing quality and increasing costs. This study examined the effectiveness of an emergency telemental health evaluation service implemented in a rural hospital emergency room.

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Telemedicine has been shown to improve rural patient outcomes in two randomized controlled trials, to increase access to many patients, to serve underserved minorities, and to train primary care providers. Yet, programs are dwindling even after successful grants due to inadequate reimbursement. Studies have been thoroughly done to gauge the payor status of potential rural telemedicine patients, as the "floodgates" are not generally open to all-including those who cannot pay-in typical grants.

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This article describes the University of California, Davis Medical Center eMental Health Consultation Service, a program designed to integrate tele-mental health clinical services, provider-to-provider consultation, and provider distance education. During the first year of operation, consultations were provided for 289 cases. The most common diagnoses among children were for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder-spectrum problems.

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Telemedicine is one strategy to improve the accessibility and quality of specialty healthcare to rural settings. After nearly 10 years of video evaluation of patients in rural primary care, telephone and e-mail physician-to-physician consultations were initiated to supplement video and hasten treatment initiation. This paper proposes a model of using telephone and e-mail consultations before or in place of video consultations, because the latter are not always available or timely.

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New models of psychiatric intervention are needed to improve the accessibility of mental health care in the primary-care setting, particularly in rural areas of the United States. Some models of service delivery have been successful in suburban and urban settings, but they do not always apply to rural settings. "E-health" innovations like videoconferencing, telephone, secure messaging (e-mail), and the Internet are increasingly being used to provide consultation--liaison service to primary care.

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