Partnership with the NRTRC Pays Off!

University of Washington/ Harborview Medical Center Behavioral Health Institute (BHI)
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Behavioral Health Institute at Harborview Medical Center (part of the UW Medicine in Seattle WA) was asked by the Washington State Health Care Authority to help train community-based providers on best practices for telebehavioral health care. 

After providing an initial series in 2020, we regrouped and created a new Continuing Medical Education (CME) and National Association of Social Workers (NASW) accredited series: “TeleBehavioral Health Training 101” a 6-session webinar series covering foundational topics, and an ongoing monthly webinar series taking a deeper dive into a variety of topics related to telehealth and virtual behavioral health care. 

To make this content more accessible, we reached out to Nicki and Jaleen at the NRTRC to partner on repackaging the webinars into online courses: now available as TeleBehavioral Health 101, 201, 301, and  401  (501 coming soon – if 501 is published, might be able to change this to “TeleBehavioral Health 101, 201, 301, 401 and the newly launched 501”) on the NRTRC online telehealth training catalogue (all CME accredited – might need to remove this since the 101-201-301 are not currently CME accredited), with over 20,000 learner engagements and completions. 

In 2024, NRTRC also partnered with us on content development, speaker recruitment, topics, and outreach for the ongoing webinar series. The results were astounding: webinar registrations increased from a total of 3205 for the 2023 series, to 5852 in 2024 with registrants from all across the country! 

The NRTRC has helped to raise awareness of these free telemental/telebehavioral health webinars and keep attendees engaged month after month. New participants are welcome!  Please visit TeleBehavioral Health – Harborview Behavioral Health Institute for more information about these and other courses along with resources for health care professionals caring for people experiencing behavioral health issues.