The transition to telehealth: Early insights from California's health care safety net
Learnings from timely virtual care initiatives can offer valuable insights into how the shift to telehealth is impacting patients, clinics, and care practices. In July 2020, the California Health Care Foundation launched the Connected Care Accelerator (CCA) to fund 43 federally qualified health centers and other community health centers in the state who were in different phases of implementing virtual care. Given the transformational nature of this shift, the initiative included an Innovation Learning Collaborative, led by the Center for Care Innovations, to support safety net health care providers with resources, tools, and technical assistance.
The Center for Community Health and Evaluation (CCHE) evaluation of the Innovation Learning Collaborative seeks to (1) understand changes in telehealth utilization over an 18-month period, and (2) identify promising practices for sustaining virtual care, managing population health, and engaging patients who may have digital barriers. Early results showed that over 90 percent of telehealth visits during the first six months of the pandemic were telephone visits. Participating teams highlighted promising practices related to promoting video visits, such as scripting during scheduling, building technology capacity among patients, supporting care teams’ telehealth capacity, and adjusting workflows for virtual care.
Findings like these provide insights to clinics and policymakers considering how virtual care has the potential to shape health care and reduce health disparities during COVID-19 and for years to come. Read more about what we’re learning about telehealth utilization in the safety net in a recent JAMA article and Health Affairs blog post: