Telehealth Tip Sheet and Pediatric Telehealth Tip Sheet for Telehealth Communication Skills

With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has broadened access to Medicare telehealth services for all health concerns to address the challenge of caring for patients. With this change, health care providers were suddenly required to provide high quality care while addressing safety for all telehealth patients, not just those who have coronavirus. Research confirms that patients accept telehealth and have the technology needed to have video or telephone calls.(1) Skilled physician communication can be taught and does improve patient satisfaction scores.(2) Providers that utilize good patient communication skills can positively impact these telehealth visits. To address the need to educate providers about effective communication skills, we developed an interactive Workshop and a Telehealth Communication Tool. Because pediatric telehealth can bring specific communication challenges, we edited the original tool to provide pediatric specific tips as well.