Center for Connected Health Policy

deployed in this situation. It was a way to provide patients with health care services, while not requiring in-person or physical contact – minimizing the risk of infection while also preserving personal protective equipment that was quickly becoming in short supply during those early days of the pandemic. However, the policy environment for telehealth, both on the federal and state level, was not conducive to the wide spread use of telehealth, limiting how and where it could be used when COVID-19 struck. While using telehealth to provide health care services was not illegal, the policies that existed pre-COVID-19, didn’t make it an attractive or feasible option for a lot of providers or health systems, so they never bothered to incorporate it. When the pandemic was upon us, two things needed to happen: 1) both state and federal governments had to temporarily change their policies to allow for greater utilization of telehealth; and 2) health care providers, including hospitals and clinics, had to quickly ramp up and utilize tools and technology to provide services in a manner they had not done so before. The state of emergencies declared on federal and state levels allowed for the necessary policy changes to happen rapidly, but temporarily. All this impacted the organization I oversee, the Center for Connected Health Policy (CCHP) – a program of the Public Health Institute. CCHP has been in existence since 2009 and was originally established to be a California telehealth policy organization. We operate as a think tank for telehealth policy and at the time of our inception we focused only on the state of California. However, an opportunity to become the federally designated national telehealth policy resource center became available through a grant from the United States Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in 2012. CCHP applied for that grant, won it, and have been serving as the policy focused telehealth resource center since. CENTER FOR CONNECTED HEALTH POL I CY (CCHP)