Rural outreach in home telehealth: assessing challenges and reviewing successes.

Most home health agencies that adopt home telehealth tend to be located in urban or metropolitan areas. This paper discusses a 3-year pilot of home telehealth in four rural areas. Several challenges related to the rural nature of the home health agencies were recognized. These challenges are discussed with recommendations for assessing rural home health agencies for home telehealth. Our findings suggest ways to improve the implementation of home telehealth for rural home health agencies. In addition to the challenges, successes were realized as well. Approximately 145 travel hours and 7500 miles of nurse travel were avoided through the use of home telehealth during the program. Patient examples show improvements in their medical conditions, which the nursing staff thought would not have been accomplished without the more frequent monitoring that home telehealth allowed the agencies to provide.