HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the entity responsible for enforcing regulations under HIPAA, stated, effective immediately, it will exercise enforcement discretion and will not impose penalties for HIPAA violations against covered healthcare providers if patients are served on a good faith basis during the COVID-19 nationwide public health emergency. Find out what this means in implementation by accessing this issue brief.

We are adding additional telehealth policy information relevant to coronavirus/ COVID-19 pandemic as it impacts health centers as it becomes available.

According to the Rural health Information Hub, the risk of contracting HIV can be greatly reduced through Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), but the medication must be taken every day and patients need follow-up appointments every 3 months. Some patients often don't have access to it due to stigma, distance from the nearest specialist, and a shortage of primary care providers willing to prescribe and monitor PrEP.

In early 2019, HITEQ completed a literature review of recent research and publications about telehealth. Within this compendium, HITEQ summarizes these articles and discusses possible implications or considerations for health centers.

A brief study of how health centers who report using telehealth compare to those who do not, using data reported on 2017 UDS. This analysis suggests that the average performance on each clinical quality measure is higher among those health centers who report using telehealth than those who do not use telehealth.