With telehealth, Behavioral Nutrition sees many more patients

Behavioral Nutrition is a holistic eating disorder outpatient clinic that treats adolescents and adults using behavioral therapy and nutritional counseling. The clinic has five locations spread out among Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Florida, New Jersey and Texas.

THE PROBLEM

The provider organization had four main challenges:

• The clinical team was looking to provide convenient nutritional support to patients who needed help but were deterred from scheduling a session due to being located several hours from a clinic location.
• With the onset of COVID-19, the team also needed a way to provide support in a safe, socially distanced manner, ideally enabling patients to receive treatment from the comfort of their own homes.
• The stigma around being recognized in a waiting room or in the facility of an eating disorder clinic was a challenge for some.
• Finally, the clinical team partnered with a video platform as it began testing telehealth options, and they found it was not consistent in terms of connectivity. The headquarters facility, for example, is a retrofitted school building from the 1950s, and broadband access is not consistent on the property. The facility needed technology that was consistent and did not require a high bandwidth, while being user friendly for the staff and patients.

PROPOSAL

For virtual care, Behavioral Nutrition selected the technology from Let's Talk Interactive. The LTI platform sends caregivers and patients a reminder with a link prior to the session.

The platform is "user friendly and professional compared with what we were using before," commented Nicole Romano, founder of Behavioral Nutrition. "How seamless the platform experience is. Pay for your copay and immediately get into the session. That was missing from our other platform.

"Let's Talk Interactive's telehealth solution is proven to operate on lower bandwidth – so the platform could easily host secure video sessions with slower internet speeds," she continued. "This solved the connectivity issues our clinicians were experiencing and enabled us to formally offer telehealth sessions on an ongoing basis, allowing our patients to attend sessions from home without any issue."

Click here to continue reading.