Remote veterans can now have access to Mental Health Clinical Resource Centers through Telehealth
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has established five VA Mental Health Telehealth Clinical Resource Centers to provide enhanced mental health access and services to veterans in remote locations.
The VA currently serves more than 677,000 veterans through telehealth, which equates to approximately 12% of the 5.6 million veterans who receive healthcare from the VA.
VA’s Mental Health Telemedicine Clinical Resource Centers will provide veterans, particularly those living in rural areas, with rapid access to mental health services where local barriers exist.
The Mental Health Telehealth Clinical Resource Centers will be located in Charleston, S.C., Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh, with a consortium of facilities in Boise, Idaho, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
The fifth facility, already operational in West Haven, Conn., is a specialty hub focused on the most severe and complex mental health issues, such as chronic depression and bipolar disorder.
The others are expected to be available this summer, with the priority given to VA medical facilities in urgent need of additional mental health providers.
VA Telehealth Services are available for more than 45 specialty areas of care. Chief telehealth modalities include:
- Clinical Video Telehealth (CVT), the use of real-time interactive video conferencing, sometimes with supportive peripheral technologies, to assess, treat and provide care to a patient remotely
- Home Telehealth (HT), a program into which veterans with chronic conditions (e.g., diabetes, congestive heart failure, etc.) are enrolled that applies care and case management principles to coordinate care using health informatics, disease management and technologies such as in-home and mobile monitoring, messaging and/or video technologies
- Store and Forward Telehealth (SFT), which uses technologies to asynchronously acquire and store clinical information (e.g. data, image, sound and video) that is then forwarded to or retrieved by a VA provider at another VA location for clinical evaluation
