No telehealth admission disparities in an adolescent psychiatric partial hospital program

The COVID-19 pandemic forced urgent and widespread changes to youth mental health care. In the week of April 1, 2020, our adolescent psychiatric partial hospitalization program (PHP) rapidly transitioned from a traditional in-person service to an entirely telehealth model. This new model made it possible to maintain maximum patient capacity, but also introduced a potential access disparity. In late 2021, state regulators expressed concern that Black and Hispanic youth had limited high-speed internet and device access at home. Thus, while those youth might still be referred to the PHP at the same rate as before, regulators worried they were now admitted to the PHP at lower rates than their (non-Hispanic) White counterparts. We agreed this proposed 'admission disparity' was a concern, especially because we had not been able to gather community feedback on telehealth feasibility before the transition. However, when we reviewed the PHP’s admission data, we found no significant difference in admission rates between Black, Hispanic, and White patients referred to the clinic. In what follows, we describe our analysis, then discuss how a pre-existing universal school program likely (and unintentionally) prevented a future mental health care disparity for our patients.