In rural areas, providers and Medicaid enrollees may face additional barriers in providing or accessing telehealth, even within states that have adopted supportive telehealth policies. This is particularly the case during a public health emergency such as COVID-19. This article offers one of the earliest estimates of telehealth provision to pregnant Medicaid enrollees during COVID-19,…
Home-based medical care (HBMC) is an increasingly important model for delivering care to Medicaid beneficiaries with complex health needs. By bringing medical services directly to patients’ homes, HBMC has the potential to improve access to care while reducing hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and overall healthcare costs. This article explores Medicaid claims data to examine the…
Geographic disparities in healthcare access remain a persistent challenge in Medicaid, prompting growing interest in area-level measures that can help identify communities with the greatest unmet needs. Multidimensional socioeconomic indexes, such as the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), may provide a more comprehensive way to target healthcare resources than traditional income-based measures alone. Understanding how these…
The Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) will invest $50 billion to strengthen healthcare access and workforce capacity in rural communities across the United States. As states develop proposals to access these funds, they need reliable data to understand the providers currently serving rural Medicaid populations and identify areas with workforce shortages. The US Medicaid Primary…
Community Health Centers (CHCs) serve nearly 1 in 6 Medicaid enrollees and provide perinatal care to about 560,000 people, playing a critical role in prenatal and postpartum care for disadvantaged populations. While 41% of CHCs—often larger centers with multidisciplinary teams—offer prenatal care to higher proportions of non-White or non-English-speaking patients, little is known about the…
Appropriate prenatal care is critical to ensuring safe childbirth, but many populations face barriers that create inequities in maternal health outcomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth emerged as a promising way to expand access, therefore driving its rapid adoption. This shift highlights the need to better understand the workforce providing telehealth for pregnancy care. This…
COVID-19 placed unprecedented strain on the health workforce. Early in the pandemic, providers faced a novel, highly infectious pathogen, and while some areas experienced increased health care demands, others saw limits in nonessential services and decreased patient visits, leading to financial pressures and layoffs. This Health Affairs Scholar article explores the use of the publicly…
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted existing structural racism that widened gaps in access to care and health outcomes, disproportionately affecting racial and ethnic minorities. Research has shown that a racially and ethnically diverse workforce can be instrumental in addressing disparities. Lack of diversity in the public health workforce can occur from several factors, including underrepresentation of…
The COVID-19 pandemic drove widespread use of telehealth, making the virtual care environment inherently different in 2021 than it had been previously. Due to unique financial constraints facing community health centers (CHCs), the sustainability of telehealth may be highly relevant to the relationship between telehealth utilization and payment parity. This article discusses the association between…
Telehealth use increased steadily in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic but underserved populations were among the least likely to use telehealth compared with affluent, privately insured populations. While recent studies have documented rapid growth in telehealth visits during the pandemic, none have analyzed the impact of telehealth on access to care. This…
