Study Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

WVU Researchers Seek Participants For Telehealth Study

A study will measure the effectiveness of telehealth as a means for patients to remain at home while managing their care.

Researchers at West Virginia University (WVU) are enrolling participants in an extended telehealth pilot program.

The project is a collaboration of the WVU Health Affairs Institute and West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, Bureau for Medical Services.

The program is an expansion of previous telehealth pilot work and will provide telehealth care to beneficiaries of Home and Community-Based Services.

Participants will have the opportunity to receive six months of telehealth services in their homes for free.

“With our telehealth program, one component of it is remote patient monitoring, monitoring of vital signs,” Associate Professor in WVU’s School of Public Health, Steven Davis, said. “They’re transmitted remotely.”

Participants will also receive a call from a nurse a couple of times a month to discuss their well-being.

Davis said telehealth can be a positive addition to existing health care.

“We would rather coordinate with their primary care providers to catch things early on so that they’re going to a lower level of care versus more costly care,” he said.

People living in West Virginia often need to go back to the hospital or are not able to live at home due to a variety of physical and mental health issues, according to Davis.

Telehealth can assist in monitoring these conditions closely to prevent unnecessary hospital visits or delays needing 24-hour care outside of the home.

To be eligible to participate, individuals must be a Medicaid Aged and Disabled Waiver, Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities Waiver, or Traumatic Brain Injury Waiver member.

Individuals interested in participating in the Extended Telehealth Pilot should complete a short interest form available on the Health Affairs Institute website at healthaffairsinstitute.org.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.

W.Va. DHHR Shares Study On Ways To Improve Support For Kinship Foster Care Families

The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) released a study this week about the barriers kinship foster care families face, and what the state can do to support them.

Kinship foster families are those in which the caregiver has a previous or current relationship to the child, as either a blood relative or another familial connection.

The study was shared to address some of the demands made in House Bill 2010, which was enacted during the 2019 legislative session. It’s a comprehensive reform bill designed to address the state’s overwhelmed foster care system.

Kinship placements are reportedly the best for a child’s stability when minors are unable to live with their parents. According to the study, kinship situations maintain a child’s ties to the community, and also reduce the trauma associated with being removed from a home.

And, the study says kinship placements can support drug addiction recovery for parents of children who are placed in foster care.

“As the nation confronts a prescription drug epidemic, the interconnections between that crisis and child welfare is apparent,” the study says.
“For families to successfully exit the system, relative/kinship care has demonstrated success in the concurrent addressing of a child’s safety and wellbeing and a parent’s recovery.”

Although the state depends on help from family friends and relatives when it comes to fostering children affected by this epidemic, the study highlights a few crucial difficulties these kinds of caregivers tend to face.

The research suggests West Virginia’s system for licensing kinship caregivers as foster parents has been inefficient. Of the 49 percent of foster care children living with kinship caregivers, the study reports 30 percent live in a licensed foster home, where the kin caregivers agreed to let the state conduct in-home interviews, visits, and retrieve character references.

Kin and relative caregivers can opt out of this certification, according to the study, but the state is still responsible for checking on the safety and wellbeing of foster children in their homes.

Because only certified foster families receive foster care stipends from the state, the study recommends streamlining the licensing process, so more kinship caregivers feel inclined to apply. The study specifically calls on the state to set a hard, 90-day timeline for this certification. It also suggests the state look into providing some kind of financial support to caregivers during the licensing period.

Non-licensed relative caregivers, with an official family connection, are eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits, while kin caregivers without that connection can apply for demand payments. The study shows those rates are comparably lower than those of some nearby states like Maryland, where caregivers with three children are eligible for $677 in benefits. (In West Virginia, that amount is $374.)

The study also recommends providing more accessible and effective training to caregivers. It points out that training is hard to get because of a lack of staff and nearby training locations.

According to a press release from the DHHR, the agency’s Bureau for Children and Families is seeking more grants, so it can implement some of these recommendations.

The study was paid for by a grant from the Casey Family Foundation, and conducted by a Pennsylvania-based group specializing in kinship foster care called A Second Chance, Inc. The DHHR said it looks forward to continuing to work more with this group.

WVU Researchers Find Too Much Light At Night May Trigger Depression

New research from West Virginia University suggests too much light, instead of too little, may cause depression in hospitalized individuals.

Researchers Randy Nelson and Courtney DeVries at the Department of Neuroscience in the WVU School of Medicine studied two groups of mice for three nights. One group was exposed to total darkness, while the other was exposed to dim light – the equivalent of a child’s night light.

The researchers found that the mice exposed to the dim light exhibited more “depressive-like” behaviors than the ones that spent their nights in the dark. The mice exposed to dim light showed smaller amounts of a molecule associated with blood-vessel growth in the hippocampus – a part of the brain that regulates emotions.

“We’re trying to mimic what happens in intensive care units,” said Nelson in a press release from the university. Nelson chairs the Department of Neuroscience.

The researchers hope the findings can be used to explore how light at night affects the mood of people who are hospitalized. People in intensive care units are often never exposed to a fully dark room while receiving treatment.

The researchers are investigating whether different lighting schemes, such as an ICU light that shifts from a bright, bluish white light during the day to a warmer tone at night, might prevent or reverse the depressive symptoms they observed in the mice. They also hope to expand their research to include human trials.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Marshall Health and Charleston Area Medical Center.

Capito Introduces Bill to Study Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome

U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito is sponsoring a federal bill to examine the rising rate and treatment costs of neonatal abstinence syndrome or NAS.

Senator Capito introduced the bi-partisan bill Friday, along with two other U.S. senators.

According to a news release, The Nurturing and Supporting Healthy Babies Act will expand research into NAS and how to care for affected infants. It will also provide ways to study the prevalence of the syndrome.

Newborns with NAS require specialized care that can result in longer hospital stays and increased costs. A recent study found these costs can be more than five times the cost of caring for other newborns.