Telemedicine: Lessons Learned

The California Endowment funded a five-year statewide telemedicine program to enhance the delivery of health-care services and educational opportunities to rural regions of the state using technology. The recipient of the funding was responsible for building telemedicine and eHealth capacity and competency among providers, increasing access to specialty care, decreasing the digital divide as it relates to healthcare services, and improving access to quality care for California's rural and underserved populations. Ten grantees throughout the state were funded to deliver telemedicine services. An external evaluation team was hired for a four-year period to assess the telemedicine project. Specifically, they were hired to evaluate the building and sustainability of networks to reduce barriers to health services for rural Californians, build evaluation capacity among the grantees, gather and share data about lessons learned, and make recommendations for improvement. The five areas of the evaluation were network development, technical assistance, education and training services, policy development and systems change, and community assessment. In this presentation we will discuss the lessons learned and recommendations for future planning. An emphasis on policies that moved the telemedicine project forward and ones that were prohibitive to it progressing will be particularly emphasized.