Abstract
The use of telehealth technologies to provide clinical services to families of children with autism and other developmental disabilities is a rapidly growing area of research. In particular, remote training of caregivers via video conferencing appears to be a promising approach for disseminating behavior-analytic interventions (Neely et al. in J Dev Phys Disabil 29:849–874, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-017-9550-4; Tomlinson et al. in J Behav Educ 27:172–222, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-018-9292-0). Although remote training offers a number of advantages, it brings a variety of challenges that are unique to this modality. The field would benefit from information on problems that practitioners may encounter when providing these services and how to train caregivers effectively. In this paper, we report on the experiences of 18 practitioners who provided caregiver training via telehealth from four different sites across a 4-year period. We describe a variety of technical and clinical issues that arose during service delivery, suggest strategies for preventing and remediating problems, and include case descriptions and data to illustrate our experiences. This information may help prepare practitioners to deliver telehealth services and guide further research in this area.
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Funding
This work was supported in whole or part by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health (Award # R01MH104363) and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) Autism Grant Program (Awards #17126, 20275). The opinions and conclusions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policy of NIH or the THECB.
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We thank Lauren Witthart, Ansley Reich, Naomi Alphonso, and Claire Wolken for their assistance with various aspects of this project.
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Lerman, D.C., O’Brien, M.J., Neely, L. et al. Remote Coaching of Caregivers via Telehealth: Challenges and Potential Solutions. J Behav Educ 29, 195–221 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-020-09378-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-020-09378-2