Board of Directors Engagement Copy Link

Including the health center’s Board of Directors in the planning for and implementation of telehealth will ensure overall strategic alignment for the organization and direct support for the executive leadership team. Suggested tactics for Board engagement include:

• Incorporate telehealth in the strategic planning process with Board approval of strategic goals
• Co-develop and/or share short and long-term telehealth goals for embedding telehealth into a new model of care
• Identify a consumer Board Member to participate in telehealth activities, particularly around patient adoption, patient experience, and health equity
• Share telehealth updates, including measures of success, at Board meetings
• Invite and welcome feedback from consumers on the Board

Designated Team Copy Link

Similar to other health center-wide strategic initiatives, such as behavioral health integration and quality improvement, the implementation and sustainability of telehealth relies heavily on engagement of all levels in the organization⁠—from the health center’s C-suite to middle management to providers and staff on care teams.

The Executive Sponsor is a senior-level leader who can lead the direction of the telehealth work, support the providers’ and staff’s efforts, and address barriers to progress. Best practices for the Executive Sponsor could include:

• Provide visible and sustained leadership to manage overall culture change, as well as specific strategies to improve telehealth capabilities
• Ensure that the telehealth improvement effort has the time and resources needed to be successful
• Align executive team via frequent communication
• Ensure that providers and other care team members have protected time to learn and fully adopt new approaches
• Build telehealth focus into staff hiring and training processes

The identification of and support for a Designated Team is critical to the success of each health center’s telehealth capabilities, effectiveness, and sustainability. The team should include: Executive Sponsor, a Provider Champion, and Team Members:

• Executive Sponsor: Senior-level leader who can lead the direction of the telehealth work, support the providers’ and staff’s efforts, and address barriers to progress
• Provider Champion: Provider who has the capacity to serve as a liaison between the Executive Sponsor, IT staff, and all providers; the Champion leads provider buy-in to new workflows and processes
• Team Members: Interdisciplinary and interdepartmental staff and providers with clear aims, authority, and boundaries to advance the telehealth improvement work, guided by a charter and workplan

• Resource

  Project Charter Worksheet

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• Resource

  Project Workplan

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Virtual Care Built Into Budget Copy Link

The role of the finance leader of the organization, in collaboration with the executive and clinical leaders, is to clearly mirror the health center’s telehealth strategy and goals in the health center’s budget. Important tactics include:

• Operationalize virtual care into providers’ schedule templates (and provider contracts if appropriate)
• Associated costs with maintaining a telehealth platform and ongoing training of staff and providers on use of platform(s)
• Adjust staffing levels to support a new model of team-based care
• Structure all care team members’ schedules to reflect time for in-person care, video and phone visits, follow-up on asynchronous communication (patient portal), and care team huddles/meetings

Established Measures of Success Copy Link

The Executive Sponsor, working with the Telehealth Team, must establish measures of success for the telehealth program, and for each telehealth sub-project as needed. The measures should align closely to the goals and include both outcome and process measures. To identify potential disparities in care, measures that include patient-level data should be analyzed by race, ethnicity, and language when possible.

The utilization of a data dashboard to track telehealth measures promotes the transparent use of data to drive improvement work while providing leadership, including the Board, with a tool to track progress to the telehealth goals. Example measures include:

• Telehealth visits as a rate of all visits
• Audio-only and video visits as rates compared to all telehealth visits
• Select quality indicators for chronic disease management (hypertension, diabetes, asthma)
• Use of patient screening tools (depression, social determinants of health)
• Patient satisfaction
• Provider and staff satisfaction
• Health equity (above measures, stratified by race, ethnicity, language)

• Partner Resource

  Telehealth Patient Experience Survey

  Patient experience survey for telehealth visits from the Telehealth Consortium

  PDF ↓

Maturity Model Assessment Copy Link

The Maturity Model assessment tool developed by the Consortium facilitates a conversation among health center leadership regarding the health center’s current telehealth capabilities and performance in relationship to their long-term strategy. The assessment mirrors the domains of the Maturity Model and provides an opportunity to identify strengths and gaps so that the health center can develop an improvement workplan to prioritize and close their telehealth gaps.

Ideally, the assessment tool is completed by each team member independently prior to the team meeting. During the meeting, the leadership team should discuss their responses and identify gaps in meeting their telehealth goals. The Gap Analysis provides specific ideas and opportunities for next steps to advance telehealth implementation and sustainability.

Using both the assessment results and the gap analysis, the health center’s Executive Sponsor, Provider Champion, and Telehealth Team should create an improvement plan.

• Partner Resource

  Maturity Model Assessment

  The Maturity Model assessment tool, developed by the Consortium

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• Partner Resource

  Maturity Model Assessment Findings Summary

  An example of a Maturity Model Assessment summary

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• Partner Resource

  Maturity Model Assessment: Gap Analysis

  An example of a Gap Analysis developed after the Maturity Model assessment

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