Telehealth can improve mental health care access in rural areas where mental health workforce shortages persist and where suicide rates are disproportionately high. The COVID-19 pandemic drove states to expand policies encouraging the delivery of telehealth services, such as Medicaid reimbursement of audio-only telehealth, parity in payment for telehealth by private payors, and regulations to deliver tele-psychological services across state lines. Substantial variation exists in policy adoption across U.S. states, which for the first time allows for naturalistic study. Telehealth policy adoption can improve health care access and outcomes, but results may vary by rurality due to preexisting access barriers (e.g., lack of broadband internet). This proposal aims to understand how rurality moderates the effect of state telehealth policy changes on patient-reported care access, physical and mental health outcomes, and functioning. By characterizing states’ telehealth policies, we can measure whether policy effects improve outcomes equally across rural and non-rural populations to help policymakers target telehealth laws more effectively.
Project Year: COE Y9 2025-2026
Evaluating Digital Health Solutions for Rural Chronic Disease Management
This project aims to assess and enhance the use of telehealth-enabled digital solutions—primarily Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) and AI support to improve chronic disease management for rural populations. Targeted conditions include but are not limited to: congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes mellitus (DM), and hypertension (HTN), cancer or other special populations which are among the most prevalent and burdensome in rural communities.
Advancing Telehealth Through Virtual Reality: Collaborative Partnerships and AI Innovations in Digital Medicine
Digital medical applications, including those in Virtual Reality (VR), are on the rise and range from mental health, to simulation and training, to physical activity and assessment. These applications provide opportunities for new ways of assessing, treating, and interacting with patients, whether they are in the room with the healthcare provider or are hundreds of miles away in rural areas. Creators who develop new medical innovations using VR often are not located in academic medical centers but rather bootstrap their innovative ideas themselves as an entrepreneur with a small business. Although they are innovative, they often lack the research training, clinical collaborators, monetary resources, and patient access to complete the research needed to validate and verify their VR applications. This situation creates multiple barriers to the rapid translation of these digital medicine VR interventions into practice. This project will utilize previously collected data to produce informative and impactful peer-reviewed publications and presentations about the development, research, and utilization of digital medical applications in VR. All products will provide useful evidence for the digital medicine and VR communities who are trying to translate evidence to practice and quickly deploy their solution to positively impact human health.
Innovative AI Models for Provider-to-Provider Consults
This project leverages artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) to aggregate and synthesize patient data from electronic medical records (EMRs) to enhance provider-to-provider consultations (eConsults). The integration of LLMs within EMR systems offers a transformative opportunity to streamline and strengthen eConsult workflows by automatically extracting, organizing, and summarizing relevant clinical information from both structured and unstructured data. These AI-generated summaries enable providers to deliver focused, high-quality case overviews for specialist review, improving the accuracy and consistency of consults while expanding access to specialty expertise in rural and underserved areas.
In parallel, the project will deploy a contracted AI platform to automate the generation of concise, one- to two-page patient summaries for eConsult submissions. By highlighting the most clinically relevant details, this system will reduce the time required for specialists to review cases, improve workflow efficiency, and enhance the timeliness and quality of consultations—ultimately enabling rapid, statewide access to specialty care through a more efficient, equitable, and AI-supported telehealth infrastructure.
Transforming Tele-Rehabilitation Through AI-Driven Biomechanical Monitoring
This project will develop and validate a cost-effective, camera-based AI platform to support remote physical rehabilitation. The system will perform real-time biomechanical analysis to:
• Monitor post-surgical movement to calculate range of motion
• Analyze exercises under controlled conditions to estimate force and torque
• Enable remote observation of progress by healthcare providers
The platform will be tested with healthy individuals and patients in controlled environments. The goal is to validate its accuracy and usability in capturing key biomechanical data, with future potential to improve access to high-quality rehabilitation in rural and underserved communities.
Improving Mental Health Access and Response Through Targeted Training
This workplan is designed to explore and address barriers to access to mental health care in communities by:
- Expanding the study to explore counseling students at other colleges and universities and their patients’ perception of mental health services provided via Telehealth. This will be expanded to include other colleges and universities nationally.
- Develop a curriculum plan based on study findings and best practices.
- Youth and Adult Mental Health First aid trainings for the public
SUD trainings for counselors and nurse practitioners.
Expanding Telehealth Knowledge and Implementation Through Training and Education
To advance the integration of telehealth services into the current healthcare delivery system by providing comprehensive training and educational opportunities for healthcare professionals. This involves engaging experts across various aspects of telehealth to enhance understanding and implementation, while expanding outreach programs to inform and educate healthcare providers on the benefits and solutions offered by telehealth. This year is different as it is a summation of all previous year’s activities as the Telehealth Implementation Bootcamp for this year will be revamped, taking into account the lessons learned from the first cohort. For general outreach, the focus will be placed on dissemination of deliverables derived from past and current projects.
Enhancing Telehealth with AI: Investigating the Integration of AI across Telehealth Modalities
In 2025, Manatt Health in partnership with the MUSC COE, conducted a stakeholder convening focused on the role of telehealth in helping mitigate the health care workforce crisis. A key finding from that convening was the likely impact AI will have on transforming many aspects of healthcare in the years to come, including both the workforce and telehealth. Some key questions that emerged included:
- What directions will AI take established telehealth programs?
- How might AI optimize these programs for patients, providers, and health systems?
- To what extent is the integration between AI and telehealth programs already happening?
- What are the potential barriers or challenges to further integrating AI into telehealth programs?
- How does AI support greater efficiency in the health care system?
Manatt Health, in collaboration with both the MUSC and UMMC Telehealth Centers of Excellence, will examine these questions over a series of four briefs, each focused on the potential opportunities and impact of integrating AI with a different telehealth modality or program. Modalities may include virtual nursing, video visits, eConsult, remote physiologic & therapeutic monitoring, and/or eVisit. The briefs will be developed through background research and key informant interviews and will follow a common template that includes background, an illustrative case vignette, and implications for future policy and research.
Findings across all briefs will be shared in an interactive forum at a national meeting like the American Telemedicine Association conference.