Care Delivery in Community Health Centers Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic (2019–2022)

Abstract

Introduction: Health centers provide primary and behavioral health care to the nation's safety net population. Many health centers served on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought major changes to health center care delivery.Objective: To elucidate primary care and behavioral health service delivery patterns in health centers before and during the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE).Methods: We compared annual and monthly patients from 2019 to 2022 for new and established patients by visit type (primary care, behavioral health) and encounter visits by modality (in-person, telehealth) across 218 health centers in 13 states.Results: There were 1581,744 unique patients in the sample, most from health disparate populations. Review of primary care data over 4 years show that health centers served fewer pediatric patients over time, while retaining the capacity to provide to patients 651. Monthly data on encounters highlights that the initial shift in March/April 2020 to telehealth was not sustained and that in-person visits rose steadily after November/December 2020 to return as the predominant care delivery mode. With regards to behavioral health, health centers continued to provide care to established patients throughout the PHE, while serving fewer new patients over time. In contrast to primary care, after initial uptake of telehealth in March/April 2020, telehealth encounters remained the predominant care delivery mode through 2022.Conclusion: Four years of data demonstrate how COVID-19 impacted delivery of primary care and behavioral health care for patients, highlighting gaps in pediatric care delivery and trends in telehealth over time.