- Key Insight: Learn how employer-sponsored telehealth fills pediatric care gaps for underserved communities.
- What's at Stake: Reduced public services may shift patient demand—and costs—toward private telehealth providers.
- Supporting Data: 1.4M lawfully present immigrants could lose coverage in 2025, increasing private telehealth demand.
- Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review
A telehealth company has launched a new workplace program to help parents get medical guidance on their
MiSalud's Healthy Kids Program aims to fill the gap created by dwindling public health resources available to both lower-income and Spanish-speaking families. The program is free and included as part of MiSalud Health workplace benefits.
Seventy-five percent of MiSalud's patients come from Latino families.
"The Latino population has a lot less access to parental guidance post-birth," says Wendy Johansson, MiSauld's co-founder and chief operating officer. "They're not going back to hospital community centers to learn how to wean off breast feeding [and provide] nutritional development after that, and so we want to offer that through telehealth."
In addition to answering questions about nutrition for infants, bi-lingual health coaches can also address parents' concerns over vaccines, sleep schedules, brain development milestones and teen physical and emotional health. They also can provide guidance on
"Having that MiSalud option always makes people a little safer," Johansson says. "We're able to give them evidence-based measures of, 'Did you know that Tylenol can reduce fever? If you know she's at 102 degrees you don't want it to get any higher than that.'"
Unique challenges
According to MiSalud, Latino children in the U.S. face some unique health challenges. For example, they have an estimated 50% chance of developing diabetes in their lifetime. Obesity among Hispanic children aged 2 to 5 is four times higher than for their non-Hispanic white counterparts.
Hispanic adolescents also have higher rates of depression and alcohol abuse, and often lack adequate access to mental health services. Johansson says MiSalud has seen an increase in the number of teens seeking help for anxiety, especially amid
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"These weigh on children," Johansson says. "Even if we're not having that conversation in front of them, they know what's happening. And so giving them the tools to understand how to deal with these feelings and have these conversations with their parents [is important]."
Many of the parents that MiSalud assists are essential workers and have jobs in the agriculture and hospitality industries.
"One of the biggest markers of absenteeism that we hear qualitatively is, 'Hey, I've got to stay home because of my kid,'" Johansson says. "The parents will power through, and it doesn't matter how sick they are. But when it comes to their children, they will stay home. And so you do see an
Filing a gap
According to KFF, 1.4 million lawfully present immigrants are expected to lose health coverage due to the 2025 Tax and Budget Law. That means more people in vulnerable populations will turn to the private sector and services like MiSalud
"One of the gaps that we are also seeing are the poor immunization schedules for measles, polio, etc," Johansson says. "We're hearing a lot of parents coming in and asking us, 'I saw this on TikTok or it was forwarded to me on WhatsApp. Is it true? We get a lot of questions like that."
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MiSalud launched the Healthy Kids Program a couple of months ago, so it's too early to measure the impact that it's having
"We should be seeing them every two to four weeks, depending on their schedule and availability, and see how they can start applying the things they're learning," Johansson says.
