Health leaders met at the 2024 Northern California State of Reform Health Policy Conference last month to discuss initiatives aiming to decrease barriers to healthcare access.
Chris Esguerra, MD, chief medical officer at Health Plan of San Mateo, said about 60 percent of the health plan’s network operates within federally-qualified health centers (FQHCs), which are federally-funded nonprofit healthcare clinics that care for historically underserved areas and populations. Esguerra said, after considering the needs of primary care physicians in FQHCs, the health plan is investing $30 million over the next five years to enhance and promote primary care practices.
“We’ve already invested in some interesting types of workforce-related support. For oral health access, we’ve already invested in an oral surgeon for one of our FQHCs,” Esguerra said.
Expenses for preventative dental health have significantly spiked, according to Esguerra, who said he wants to see more utilization of services.
“For oral health, for something that’s been so disinvested and limited historically, prior to us taking in dental coverage, there were about 40 to 50 contracted providers with the state dental program. We have over 400 at this point,” Esguerra said.
Sylvia Trujillo is the executive director of the California Telehealth Resource Center, which is one of 12 regional resource centers that is primarily funded by the federal government, with additional funding streams coming from the state.
“Our responsibility and goal is to really provide evidence-based, unbiased technical assistance resource education and workforce upscaling around digital health adoption,” Trujillo said.
Patient wait times have recently increased, Trujillo said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, providers were allowed major state and federal flexibilities for digital health services, but staff at the center now have to think of ways to meet patients where they are in the community. She said technology needs to be a part of the solution, but it cannot be the only solution. Additional solutions include peer deployment, modernizing health information technology (IT) systems, and training, Trujillo said.
Some areas of digital health have restrictions in place, which stem from policy measures, Trujillo said. For example, Medi-Cal and Medicare are becoming more documentation-intensive, which creates a level of complexity when there are high rates of burnout among clinicians and operational staff.
“We’re not just talking about the need to improve the workforce of clinical staff, but we’re looking at operational staff that have the requisite skills to implement health IT and digital health solutions so clinicians and allied health professionals are not obligated to do that because they are already burnt out.”
— Trujillo
Trujillo said the center is conducting work around artificial intelligence (AI) education and necessary systems are being deployed.
“We simply are not going to have enough humans to fill in the gaps of what we’re seeing in terms of demand,” Trujillo said.
When it comes to AI, healthcare leaders must consider safety, sustainability, effectiveness, and scalability within their practice and healthcare systems, Trujilo said.