How VMAP Education Empowers Providers

With over 12,000 cases on the VMAP Line and 2,000 providers trained through VMAP education, we have lots of interesting data to help us explore how these two services impact Virginia clinicians.

We've asked our data team to give us some insight on the interaction between the VMAP Line and our education trainings, to help us answer three questions:  

1. How does taking a VMAP training impact call line behavior? 
2. How does VMAP Line experience impact clinicians before + after CME training?  
3. How does VMAP education empower providers? 

To explore this, we need to evaluate two types of providers: ones that have taken a VMAP educational offering and have called the line, versus providers that have only called the line. Here's how we're labeling them for this deep dive! 

• Pre-Trainees: VMAP Line callers who also took a core VMAP educational offering = pre-trainees if the call happened before their training 

• Post-Trainees: VMAP Line callers who also took a core VMAP educational offering = post-trainees if the call happened after their training. 

• • Collectively, these two groups are "trainees!" 

To appropriately understand this research, here's a brief reminder of the services that VMAP offers to Virginia clinicians. 

• The VMAP Line: offers free same-day (within 30 minutes!) consultation and care navigation for Virginia primary care, maternal health, and other healthcare professionals who treat pediatric (0-21) and perinatal patients. 

• VMAP Provider Education: Each year, VMAP puts on a variety of expert-led CME pediatric and perinatal mental health trainings. These opportunities are designed to be low or no cost and convenient for prescribers with busy schedules. 

Here are some of our key findings with post-trainees versus pre-trainees! 

After Training

• More likely to have used a psychiatric screening tool prior to calling the line (64%)

Screening Tool Usage by Type

• Depression: 72%
• Anxiety: 57%
• ADHD: 43%

Before Training

• Less likely to have used a psychiatric screening tool prior to calling the line (57%)

Screening Tool Usage by Type

• Depression: 66%
• Anxiety: 48%
• ADHD: 28%

• Our findings suggest that VMAP trainings appear to contribute to the usage of specific screening tools prior to calling the VMAP Line.
• In other words, providers who had taken a VMAP training were more likely to have already screened their patient before calling the VMAP Line for support.
• This demonstrates their confidence and knowledge to be able to select the correct screening tool and use it with patients who need it most.
• We also found that providers who had not taken a VMAP training had similar or lower rates to pre-trainees, indicating that the difference was most likely due to the impact of the training itself and not the trainee population.

After seeing the difference in screening tool usage between pre- and post-trainees, we explored how a provider's experience with the VMAP Line, specifically consultations, can impact education results with ECHO, one of our core offerings.   

VMAP Line Callers

• Slightly lower confidence before starting ECHO (2.76 average)
• Greater increase in confidence after ECHO (0.78 increase)

Non-Callers

• Slightly higher confidence before starting ECHO (2.99 average)
• Lesser difference in confidence after ECHO (0.56 increase)

• What we found is that after taking an ECHO training, both callers and non-callers experienced a significant increase in how confidently they handle complex pediatric mental health cases.
• Final confidence rates seem relatively stable between VMAP Line callers and non-callers, but callers have a greater jump in confidence after the training.
• An explanation for this could be that VMAP Line callers have better awareness of what they don't know, thanks to their collaboration with a consulting physician.  

Each year, we see the number of providers who engage with both parts of VMAP grow exponentially. As more Virginia providers utilize our program, more patients get the mental health support they need sooner. These two halves of VMAP – our provider education and our call line – complement one another to support providers across the state.