In this report, the authors summarize data on the use of in-person, audio-only, and video health visits during September 2022 to August 2024, a period that included the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency in May 2023 and beyond. These data were collected to evaluate the impact of the Connected Care Accelerator program, which supports health centers in implementing telehealth for low-income patients in California.

Telehealth Visits in Health Centers Serving Low-Income Patients in California

Final Results from the Connected Care Accelerator Initiative (2022–2024)

Lori Uscher-Pines, Jessica L. Sousa, Colleen M. McCullough, Shirley Dong, Kandice A. Kapinos

ResearchPublished Dec 19, 2024

Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) are outpatient health centers that provide primary care and limited specialty-care services to nearly 30 million low-income patients. Prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, FQHCs rarely delivered audio-only or video telehealth visits. However, with both temporary and permanent policy changes to facilitate telehealth use at the state and federal levels, telehealth has become an important modality of care. In 2023, approximately 9 percent of FQHC visits in the United States and 20 percent of FQHC visits in California occurred via video or audio-only visits delivered into patients' homes.

In this report, the authors summarize data on the use of in-person, audio-only, and video health visits during September 2022 to August 2024, a period that included the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency in May 2023 and beyond. These data were collected to evaluate the impact of the Connected Care Accelerator program, which is an effort launched by the California Health Care Foundation in July 2020 to support health centers in implementing telehealth for low-income patients in California. This report is the final in a series of reports that were published from 2021 to 2024. 

Key Findings

  • Telehealth, which includes video and audio-only visits, continued to play a prominent role in primary care and behavioral health care delivery in California health centers, accounting for about one-fourth and one-half of all visits, respectively, from September 2022 to August 2024.
  • Telehealth visits—and video visits in particular—comprised an incrementally smaller proportion of overall primary care and behavioral health visits over time. For primary care, the share of video visits decreased from 8.9 percent in September 2022 to 5.4 percent in August 2024. Over the same period, audio-only primary care visits declined from 19.5 percent to 17.3 percent.
  • Most health centers in California continued to offer all three visit modalities (in-person, video, audio-only) for primary care (n = 20; 83 percent) and behavioral health care (n = 17; 70.8 percent) during the final year of the study period (September 2023–August 2024).
  • There were persistent disparities in telehealth use according to patient language preference. Patients whose preferred language was English were overrepresented among primary care and behavioral health patients with video visits. For example, in the case of behavioral health, patients who preferred English represented 80.1 percent of patients with video visits but 66.6 percent of unique patients with any visits in the final year of the study period (September 2023–August 2024).

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Uscher-Pines, Lori, Jessica L. Sousa, Colleen M. McCullough, Shirley Dong, and Kandice A. Kapinos, Telehealth Visits in Health Centers Serving Low-Income Patients in California: Final Results from the Connected Care Accelerator Initiative (2022–2024), RAND Corporation, RR-A3468-1, 2024. As of April 8, 2025: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3468-1.html

Chicago Manual of Style

Uscher-Pines, Lori, Jessica L. Sousa, Colleen M. McCullough, Shirley Dong, and Kandice A. Kapinos, Telehealth Visits in Health Centers Serving Low-Income Patients in California: Final Results from the Connected Care Accelerator Initiative (2022–2024). Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2024. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3468-1.html.
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This research was sponsored by the California Health Care Foundation and carried out within the Access and Delivery Program in RAND Health Care.

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