Telehealth and Public Health Practice in the United States-Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Telehealth is the use of electronic information and telecommunication technologies to provide care when the patient and the provider are not in the same room at the same time. Telehealth accounted for less than 1% of all Medicare Fee-for-Service outpatient visits in the United States in 2019 but grew to account for 46% of all visits in April 2020. Changes in reimbursement and licensure policies during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to greatly facilitate this increased use. Telehealth will continue to account for a substantial portion of care provided in the United States and globally. A better understanding of telehealth approaches and their evidence base by public health practitioners may help improve their ability to collaborate with health care organizations to improve population health. The article summarizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) approach to understanding the evidence base for telehealth in public health practice, possible applications for telehealth in public health practice, and CDC's use of telehealth to improve population health.

COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on the National Health Care Surveys.

While underscoring the need for timely, nationally representative data in ambulatory, hospital, and long-term-care settings, the COVID-19 pandemic posed many challenges to traditional methods and mechanisms of data collection. To continue generating data from health care and long-term-care providers and establishments in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Center for Health Statistics had to modify survey operations for several of its provider-based National Health Care Surveys, including quickly adding survey questions that captured the experiences of providing care during the pandemic. With the aim of providing information that may be useful to other health care data collection systems, this article presents some key challenges that affected data collection activities for these national provider surveys, as well as the measures taken to minimize the disruption in data collection and to optimize the likelihood of disseminating quality data in a timely manner. (Am J Public Health. 2021;111(12):2141-2148. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306514).