A report published June 2021 titled Community Health Centers’ Telehealth Promising Practices published by the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), https://www.nachc.org, presents case studies on how Community Health Centers have effectively used telehealth during the COVID pandemic.
The case studies include both rural and urban community health centers in the U.S and covers several different types of telehealth programs. Today, telehealth is being used in primary care, behavioral health, dental, chronic disease management, home health, dietetics, paramedicine, and school-based clinics.
For example, one case describes how HealthLinc, https://healthincchc.org, a Community Health Center based in Indiana, stepped up to effectively use telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Melissa Mitchell, COO at HealthLinc, “We were able to get a large chunk of our telehealth services up and running within two weeks because we had many of the systems and workflows in place for our behavioral medicine and school based telehealth programs.
Before the pandemic, HealthLinc’s CEO Beth Wrobel had already started talking about initiating research on paramedicine. With the COVID pandemic, the effort to establish the paramedicine program was accelerated, according to Christina Serrano, Strategy and Compliance Program Manager at HealthLinc.
HealthLinc then worked with InHealth https://inhealth.com, a paramedic company to discuss ideas related to paramedicine and look at ways to secure grant funding. HealthLinc learned early on that their most fragile senior patient populations were not tech savvy and were most likely to need regular lab and blood work.
Through the paramedicine program, paramedics would visit the elderly in their homes to draw blood, give vaccines, or facilitate telehealth visits with providers. According to Melissa Mitchell, “Once you go into people’s homes, it is possible to see other social determinants of health. This provides the opportunity to suggest additional resources such as getting in touch with a food bank or to set up a nutritionist visit. This enables better care to be provided for the whole person.”