Louisiana Public Health Institute, Louisiana Primary Care Association, Community Health Center Association of Mississippi, Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers

The Primary Care and Behavioral Health Collaboration is unique in nature as the collaboration includes two states – Mississippi and Louisiana and four project teams:

• Community Health Center Association of Mississippi (CHCAMS) is composed of 20 organizational members of Community Health Centers throughout Mississippi. As of 2019, the organization had provided services to 307,000 individual patients.
• Louisiana Primary Care Association (LPCA) is a membership organization that represents 39 federally funded Community Health Center organizations across Louisiana.
• Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI) is a statewide nonprofit organization that leads and partners with communities to ensure that everyone has fair and just opportunities to be healthy and well.
• Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers is a membership association that promotes the common interests of Mississippi’s Community Mental Health Centers.

Grounded in advancing racial equity, authentic engagement with consumers and intentional collaboration, the Community Health Center Association of Mississippi (CHCAMS), Louisiana Primary Care Association (LPCA), Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI), and Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Center will implement the Delta Center: Advancing Equitable Care and Payment for Telehealth in Louisiana and Mississippi project. The project vision is to improve the health of Louisianans and Mississippians served by safety net providers through offering high-quality, readily available, and equitable telehealth care.

The project objectives include: 

• Launching a racially equitable telehealth care and payment project that will be rolled out in two phases:
  • Phase 1: Convene a steering committee made up of consumers, representatives from primary care and safety net provider organizations, and our grantee team to develop race equitable policy recommendations to:
    • Authentically engage consumers in equitable telehealth care and payment strategy, including engaging consumers to understand consumer priorities for care; and how the policy change will support equitable outcomes and help articulate value-proposition for state policy makers; and
    • Advance racial equity and ensure that racial equity is built into the walls of telehealth care and policy work, including assessing research and policy for racial equity at the start, investment in racial equity as a standard of practice, and leading with racial equity.
  • Phase 2: Launch a community of practice with up to four Community Behavioral Health Organization-Federally Qualified Health Center dyads (made up of a total of eight provider organizations) in two rural regions and two urban regions across the states of Louisiana and Mississippi to pilot and inform the racially equitable telehealth policy recommendations.
• Fostering intentional collaboration across primary care and behavioral health safety net provider associations across Louisiana and Mississippi.
• Developing and disseminating racially equitable policy recommendations for each state and/or local governments on ways to cement, sustain and/or expand telehealth access and quality. These policy recommendations will focus on keeping and enhancing the current advantages of telehealth, including making permanent recent payment changes towards telehealth and seek to remove remaining regulatory and workforce barriers to health access; and make permanent recent payment changes that have allowed reimbursement for audio-only.