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“It’s a safe haven for them,” says Gabriel Lopez, the center’s director of health information systems. COVID-19 “changed the landscape for us, but now we’re starting to see the benefits.”
The center, a federally qualified health center, handles primary, sexual health, mental health, addiction recovery and pharmacy services for more than 30,000 people, including sizable homeless and youth populations and some who travel from out of state.
Lopez says the center hadn’t done much with telehealth prior to the pandemic. An Allscripts customer since 2008, they’d launched a patient portal three years ago and seen an adoption rate of about 78 percent.
“We’d talked about telehealth, and we were anticipating that something was going to happen,” he says. “We wanted to be ahead of the curve, just in case.”
In early March, the center moved to a phone-based telehealth platform, first for primary care and then for mental health services. By April they’d introduced video visits.
Gabriel says the process, while expedited to meet the demands of the pandemic, was handled carefully, to ease the concerns of both providers and patients. For a population not always comfortable in seeking care, the clinic – and the in-person visit – was valuable. Both patients and providers were eased onto a phone-based platform first, then introduced to video.
With the platform in place, both providers and patients are now discovering a new way of connecting for care. It takes the burden off of patients who have to travel to the center, and who have problems scheduling multiple visits.
“It gives them a lot of flexibility to engage with us,” Lopez says. “It’s nice that they can access services when and where they want, in privacy. We’re finding that it’s sometimes easier to connect.”
Because of COVID-19, the center has seen a 15 percent decrease in primary care visits, a 75 percent reduction in STI care and a 33 percent reduction in mental health visits, while its pharmacy business has seen a jump of 10 percent. Gabriel and his staff expect those numbers to even out as the pandemic plays itself out and patients become more accustomed to telehealth and mHealth.
“In time this will be” an accepted standard of care, he says. “We’ll still do a lot of in-person care, and there are those who prefer in-person visits.” But the option will be there to connect online.
And with that connected health platform in place, Lopez is looking to the future. He’d like to expand the center’s list of services to include more wellness and holistic care, as well as PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) treatment for those at risk of HIV. And he’s talking with the LA City Health Department to expand STI testing to the home, while using telehealth to coordinate tests and handle remote patient care.
He’s also working to collect data on the platform’s effectiveness, and the collect stories from patients about their telehealth experiences. With many of the center’s patients on Medicaid or Medicare, it will be important to develop and argument for continued coverage beyond the pandemic, when many of the emergency measures run out.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen then,” Lopez says. “We don’t know what’s going to change.”
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