The Telehealth Improvement Community Fund was a “low-intensity, highly flexible” initiative designed to help community health centers and other safety net health centers in California boost their use of video telehealth. During this seven-month initiative, funded by the California Health Care Foundation and managed by CCI, participants were able to roll out regular video visits and promising practices for expansion.
The 27 organizations in the initiative began by adopting an approach to virtual care from CCI’s Framework for Accessible Video Visits, according to a report from the Center for Community Health and Evaluation. They also had access to CCI’s Virtual Learning Hub, an e-learning training series delivered via email, and a series of five open webinars and five peer-expert office hour sessions. Although the project was less intensive than other CCI learning collaborations, the results were impressive:
- Participants made considerable progress in installing new hardware and software and/or implementing new workflows and staff training, improving patients’ access to care. As one provider said: “Enabling patients to receive care remotely reduces barriers related to transportation, time constraints, and mobility issues.” Another participant even shared, “It helped us to speed up the process and get faster to the goals that we set out for telehealth.”
- Video services have led to cost savings and increased safety for both patients and healthcare providers. As another provider noted, “At our residential programs, TICF enabled us to establish mobile telehealth workstations wheeled directly into client rooms to increase accessibility to appointments, especially during detox or contagion isolation. Doing this gave us the ability to have clients seen faster and stabilize quicker, which has been a massive value add.”
- Clinics and health centers were gratified by the webinars and online learning, with one commenting that the enhanced training materials were the “most valuable component” of TICF for their team. Said another: “Our entire staff is [now] part of our telehealth ‘tech support’ team.”
The evaluators concluded that TICF “demonstrated that community health centers can be highly engaged and have high satisfaction with a less intensive, more flexible initiative while adopting promising practices and achieving meaningful progress on an improvement project.”
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