A Multicampus Infrastructure to Advance Telehealth Implementation for Low-Income Californians in Response to COVID-19”
Researcher/s: Hector Rodriguez, Denise Payan, Lorena Garcia | UC Berkeley, UC Merced, UC Davis
On March 6, the President signed H.R. 6074, or the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020. This bill grants $8.3 billion to address COVID-19 and permits the Secretary of Health and Human Services to allow the patient’s home to be an originating site of care. COVID-19 and H.R. 6074 provide substantial incentives for Federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), which care for low-income Californians, to transition from face-to-face visits to telehealth encounters for chronic care management. FQHCs, however, have historically lagged in their adoption of telehealth due to technological constraints; innovation is needed to improve the implementation and impact of telehealth for low-income patients. The proposed project builds a multi-campus research data infrastructure for tracking telehealth utilization among California’s FQHCs and integrates these data with electronic health record (EHR) data to examine the impact of telehealth implementation on clinical outcomes. The resulting integrated dataset will serve as the foundation for a diverse set of natural experiments examining the impact of COVID-19 and the transition to telehealth utilization on health outcomes for low-income Californians with chronic conditions.
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