| Course | NU 715 Telehealth to Expand Health Care Access and Delivery |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 8 |
| Paper type | Telehealth program plan |
| Length | About 1,050 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Herzing University |
| Program | MSN |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for NU 715 Unit 8
Program Plan for Remote Heart Failure Care in a Rural Kansas Health System: The Case, Permission, Payment, Equipment, Staffing, Reach, and Measures
Student Name
Department of Nursing, Herzing University
NU 715: Telehealth to Expand Health Care Access and Delivery
Instructor Name
March 11, 2026
Program Plan for Remote Heart Failure Care in a Rural Kansas Health System: The Case, Permission, Payment, Equipment, Staffing, Reach, and Measures
The Clinical Case
Population: adults discharged with heart failure from a composite rural Kansas health system's 25-bed critical access hospital, about 180 a year. Problem: last year, only 41% were seen within a week of going home, largely because many live 40 to 90 minutes away, and 24% were readmitted within 30 days. Being seen soon after a heart failure admission has been associated with lower readmission rates in Medicare patients (Hernandez et al., 2010), and structured telephone support and home telemonitoring have been shown in a systematic review to reduce heart failure hospitalizations (Inglis et al., 2015). A large randomized trial of structured remote management also found patients lost fewer days to unplanned heart-related admission or death (Koehler et al., 2018). Modality: a video visit within seven days, held by default at an outlying clinic where a nurse can assist, or to the patient's home; a month of home readings sent from the patient's own scale, cuff, and oximeter; and phone visits for anyone video does not suit.
Permitted: Licensure and Scope
The service's clinicians are licensed in Kansas, and the location of every patient is confirmed at the start of each visit. One nurse practitioner who lives in Missouri holds a Kansas advanced practice license and practices as a registered nurse through the multistate compact. Patients who are outside Kansas at the time of a visit are rescheduled or directed to local care. The service does not prescribe controlled substances by telehealth, which avoids separate federal requirements.
Paid: Coverage by Payer
Medicare, about 70% of patients: clinic-based video visits are covered under permanent rules because the outlying clinics are eligible rural originating sites; home video depends on temporary extensions, checked at launch and each year; remote monitoring is paid under monitoring codes that are not subject to originating site rules, with 20% coinsurance discussed with each patient. Medicare Advantage plans used locally cover home video and monitoring. State Medicaid, about 15%: video covered; monitoring covered with variation by plan. Commercial, about 15%: covered under state law for state-regulated plans, checked individually. Telephone visits are budgeted as partly unpaid.
Equipment
Clinician workstations with high-definition cameras, headsets, wired connections, and a backup device; loaned cellular-enabled tablets for patients without a usable device; cellular monitoring hubs that need no home internet; and written procedures for every failure, from a dropped call to an emergency during a visit, including confirmation of each patient's location at the start of every visit so that help can be sent if the connection is lost.
Staffing
With about 180 patients a year each monitored for 30 days, about 15 patients will be enrolled at any time. Staffing: a monitoring nurse at 0.6 full-time equivalent, for daily data review, alert calls, and teaching; one-fifth of the heart failure nurse practitioner's time for video visits and management; a digital navigator at 0.5 full-time equivalent for device setup and practice calls; outlying clinic nurses for about 30 minutes per clinic-based visit, absorbed within current staffing; and an agreement with the local home health agency for a nursing visit on the day of the first video visit for patients who live alone.
Budget Outline
Costs in the first year are mainly staff time, 1.3 full-time equivalents across the monitoring nurse, nurse practitioner share, and navigator, and equipment: 20 monitoring kits, allowing for replacements and devices in transit, 12 loaned tablets with data plans, and a platform license the system already holds. Revenue comes from video visit payments, originating site fees at the outlying clinics, and monitoring codes, less the unpaid telephone visits and patients who decline monitoring because of coinsurance. The finance office's preliminary estimate is that direct revenue covers most but not all of the direct cost in year one. The balance is justified by avoided readmissions, each of which occupies a scarce bed in a 25-bed hospital and counts toward federal readmission penalties, and by the program's role in keeping follow-up care in the community rather than 90 miles away. The estimate will be revised after six months with actual enrollment and payment data.
Who the Program Will Not Reach
The equity audit of last year's patients found that about 22% had no device, roughly a quarter lacked adequate home broadband, more than a third needed someone to help them begin a video call, a third live alone, and 8% prefer Spanish on an English-only platform. National data show that a large share of older adults are not ready for video visits, especially the oldest (Lam et al., 2020). The design responds with clinic-based visits by default, loaned devices, telephone visits as a full option, captioning and interpreters, and home health support. Even so, some patients will not be reached: those who decline all remote contact, those without phone service, and those too ill to engage. For them, the program's contribution is limited to a scheduled clinic visit with transportation assistance, which the hospital already offers.
Measures
Primary outcomes, reported quarterly: the share seen within a week of discharge, baseline 41%, target 80% in the first year; and 30-day all-cause readmission, baseline 24%, target 18% by the end of year two, recognizing that 180 patients a year makes year-to-year change noisy. Process measures: monitoring days per patient, the proportion of monitoring alerts followed by a call within four hours, and conversions from video to telephone or in-person care. Equity measures: enrollment and seven-day completion by age group, living situation, language, and broadband status. Safety measures: emergency visits within 48 hours of a remote encounter, reviewed individually.
What Would Tell the Organization It Is Working, or Not
The program is working if, after one year, at least 80% of patients have a seven-day visit, enrollment does not differ markedly by age or connectivity, and no safety review finds harm from remote management. If seven-day visits rise but readmissions do not fall by the end of year two, the program's content, not its reach, will need to change. If enrollment is concentrated among younger, connected patients, the program will have widened a gap it was meant to close, and its design will be revised. These criteria are set now, before launch, so that the evaluation cannot be shaped by the results.
References
Hernandez, A. F., Greiner, M. A., Fonarow, G. C., Hammill, B. G., Heidenreich, P. A., Yancy, C. W., Peterson, E. D., & Curtis, L. H. (2010). Relationship between early physician follow-up and 30-day readmission among Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for heart failure. JAMA, 303(17), 1716-1722. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.533
Inglis, S. C., Clark, R. A., Dierckx, R., Prieto-Merino, D., & Cleland, J. G. F. (2015). Structured telephone support or non-invasive telemonitoring for patients with heart failure. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (10), Article CD007228. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD007228.pub3
Koehler, F., Koehler, K., Deckwart, O., Prescher, S., Wegscheider, K., Kirwan, B.-A., Winkler, S., Vettorazzi, E., Bruch, L., Oeff, M., Zugck, C., Doerr, G., Naegele, H., Störk, S., Butter, C., Sechtem, U., Angermann, C., Gola, G., Prondzinsky, R., ... Stangl, K. (2018). Efficacy of telemedical interventional management in patients with heart failure (TIM-HF2): A randomised, controlled, parallel-group, unmasked trial. The Lancet, 392(10152), 1047-1057. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31880-4
Lam, K., Lu, A. D., Shi, Y., & Covinsky, K. E. (2020). Assessing telemedicine unreadiness among older adults in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. JAMA Internal Medicine, 180(10), 1389-1391. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.2671
NU 715 Unit 8 instructions, in plain terms
Unit 8 asks you to write a complete telehealth program plan, usually drawing on earlier units. Expect to present the clinical case, address licensure and scope, describe payment, specify equipment, plan staffing, outline a budget, identify who will not be reached and define measures and decision rules. As the final unit, it rewards drawing earlier work together over restating it. Check your section's length limit. Use numbers from earlier work, such as population size and payer mix, consistently. A plan that names its own limits, including patients it will not reach, is stronger than one that promises universal access. Measures should have baselines and targets, and the plan should say what results would tell leaders it is or is not working.
Inside the NU 715 Unit 8 example
The plan opens with the clinical case in numbers: population, current follow-up rate and readmissions. Permission and payment sections summarize earlier analyses in a few sentences each, citing the rules they rest on. Equipment is listed by function. Staffing is calculated from enrollment, showing the arithmetic from 180 patients a year to 15 at a time. The budget outline separates staff time from equipment. The section on who the program will not reach carries forward the equity audit, with the mitigations already planned. Measures give baselines, targets and reporting frequency. The final section states what results after one year would show the program working and what would prompt a change, which turns the plan into a decision tool.
Reading the NU 715 Unit 8 rubric
Herzing's rubric for the program plan generally weighs the clinical rationale, regulatory and payment feasibility, operational design, staffing and budget, equity, evaluation and integration. In a closing unit, integration counts for a great deal, so earlier analyses must be used consistently. Clinical rationale points require local data and evidence for remote heart failure care. Feasibility criteria look for accurate licensure and payment statements. Staffing and budget points go to calculations with assumptions. Equity is scored on named gaps and mitigations. Evaluation earns credit for baselines, targets and decision rules that leaders could apply at one year without further analysis. References follow APA 7, including Inglis's review, Koehler's trial and Hernandez on early follow-up.
NU 715 Unit 8 help before you submit
Final plans in Unit 8 most often lose points by repeating earlier units at length instead of integrating them. Another frequent problem is inconsistent numbers, such as a population of 180 in one section and 220 in another. Students often skip staffing calculations. Payment is sometimes summarized as covered without conditions. Equity is reduced to a sentence. Measures lack baselines, so improvement cannot be shown. Decision rules are often missing, which leaves leaders with data but no way to act on it. Finally, keep the plan within length by summarizing earlier analyses in a few sentences each, because graders want to see how the parts fit together rather than reread each earlier paper.
Get a NU 715 Unit 8 example written to your instructions
Send the Unit 8 instructions and the rubric from your NU 715 classroom, plus the service, the population and the states involved. We write a custom example with permission and payment settled before operations, the excluded patients named, a phased launch and a decision point tied to stated measures, returned in 24 to 48 hours. The first custom sample is free.
More NU 715 papers and MSN samples
- NU 715 Unit 1: Telehealth modality brief
- NU 715 Unit 2: Remote examination protocol
- NU 715 Unit 3: Encounter suitability criteria
- NU 715 Unit 4: State licensure and compact analysis
- NU 715 Unit 5: Coverage and payment assessment
- NU 715 Unit 6: Digital access equity audit
- NU 715 Unit 7: Equipment and connectivity standard
- NU 760 Unit 8: Peer review response
- NU 780 Unit 8: Population outcome evaluation
- NU 480 Unit 8: Practice readiness statement
- NU 602 Unit 8: Study protocol outline
NU 715 Unit 8 questions, answered
Can the plan build on my earlier units?
That is usually the intention, and the work sits in reconciling them rather than pasting them together. A criteria set written early in the term often conflicts with the payment conditions discovered later, and the plan has to resolve that visibly. Check what your instructions allow on reusing your own work, and expect at least one earlier piece to need rewriting once the whole service is on the page.
How detailed should the evaluation section be?
Detailed enough that somebody could collect the measures without asking what you meant. Name each measure, where the number comes from, how often it is read and who reads it, and include at least one equity measure so the service is judged on who reached it as well as on volume. A named decision date is what gives evaluation consequences.
Is a program plan the closing submission every term?
Not necessarily. Herzing does not post a deliverable for every unit, and sections differ in what the final assignment requires. In many sections the closing assignment gathers everything the term covered onto one service, which is why this example is assembled rather than argued. Your own instructions settle the actual form.
Where can I find a free NU 715 Unit 8 sample paper?
The complete NU 715 Unit 8 rural heart failure program plan is free to read on this page, from the case to measures and decision rules. A custom plan can bring together your own earlier units for a different service.
What should a telehealth program plan include for a nursing course?
The clinical case, licensure and scope, payment by payer, equipment, staffing and budget, who will not be reached and measures with baselines and targets. This sample covers each for a rural heart failure service and ends with one-year decision rules.