The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless(CCH) provides both medical, behavioral health, and social services to thousands of individuals who have insecure housing.
However, they struggled with getting these individuals to come in for services.
Through a grant from the Colorado Health Foundation and a follow-up grant from the Office of eHealth Innovation, Care on Location designed, built, installed, and trained CCH staff to engage individuals in telemedicine wherever they are located.
We engaged with them to address three main issues:
- Provide a mobile telemedicine solution that can care for people on the street. We developed a modular standing telemedicine backpack to be worn by the Street Outreach Team that allowed for access to medical and behavioral health services from homeless encampments, under bridges and doorways, and from other medically non-traditional locations.
- Provide a “pop-up” telehealth clinic in CCH-operated temporary shelters such as hotels, motels, and other residential locations during the COVID pandemic to provide care in place when access to medical clinics was limited
- Develop a telehealth program for a rural Fort Lyon Residential Transitional Housing location that is a 4-hour drive from Denver. A primary care physician was driving there and back weekly from Denver. We were to establish a means of providing quality care at this rural facility while minimizing the cost and travel involved in driving the care provider to that location.
