Washington – Today, Rep. Mike Thompson (CA-05) announced that Santa Rosa Community Health (SRCH) is receiving a $1,999,488 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services through the Optimizing Virtual Care program.

“During the pandemic, access to virtual health care has been essential to keeping our communities safe and improving health outcomes,” said Thompson. “Community health centers like SRCH are vital to ensuring that healthcare is accessible to every corner of our district, and I am proud to announce this critical funding that will expand care through telehealth and better train our healthcare professionals to handle virtual care.”

“Our team is absolutely thrilled to receive this grant to advance telehealth care for and with our patients. The COVID-19 pandemic, combined with years of wildfires in Sonoma County and Santa Rosa in particular, has dramatically impacted our patients’ health and their ability access to health care. This new funding will help us to develop a long-term model for virtual care that is impactful and sustainable and satisfying for both patients and providers. Congressman Thompson’s continued advocacy for the role of telehealth in improving access to quality care has been critical in making this part of the national agenda,” said Naomi Fuchs, CEO of Santa Rosa Community Health Centers.

Santa Rosa Community Health’s Optimizing Virtual Care program aims to improve the health and wellbeing of patients. Process and outcome measures include:

1. Improvements in clinical measures for diabetes, hypertension and depression
2. Reductions in disparities across ethnicities, housing status, and insurance status
3. Improvements in provider and patient satisfaction
4. Increases in care quality and continuity
5. Increases in financial sustainability for virtual care

To achieve these goals, Santa Rosa Community Health will build on past experiences by:

• Expanding their capacity to fill critical resource gaps in virtual care staffing, training, technology access, and platform integration.
• Leveraging existing community collaborations to apply other organizations’ expertise and resources towards the delivery and optimization of virtual care.
• Developing the policies, procedures, workflows, and clinical environments that are necessary to sustain integration of telehealth, remote monitoring, and electronic patient communications beyond prior disaster response solutions.

To understand the rate of change, SRCH went from less than 1 percent telehealth visits in 2019, almost all of which were for mental health services, to 49 percent telehealth visits in 2020. 94 percent of those visits were over the phone, not video. Patients who identify as Hispanic/Latinx accessed telehealth care 14 percent less often than non-Hispanic patients due to technology barriers and other social determinants like poor internet connection or a lack of private space to have a virtual visit.

Rep. Thompson co-founded the Congressional Telehealth Caucus and wrote the legislation authorizing the expansion of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic.