CPCA Goes Virtual and Restructures Workforce amid COVID-19
While the California Primary Care Association (CPCA) is no stranger to responding to crises, such as the most recent devastating wildfires, the arrival of COVID-19 raised our emergency response efforts to another level, resulting in the need to transition our entire staff to be a virtual workforce. We also determined that a reorganization of our work was necessary to best meet the needs of our members.
Shortly after new cases of COVID-19 started to emerge in California, CPCA, in prioritizing the health and safety of our staff and community, transitioned our in-office staff to an entirely work-from-home workforce. Friday, March 13th marked the first day that CPCA began working as a virtual organization, and on March 19th Governor Newsom announced a statewide stay at home order. Thankfully, CPCA already had the technology and infrastructure in place to quickly and seamlessly make the move to becoming an all-virtual organization.
At the time that the stay at home orders were enacted, health centers were facing mounting challenges of their own, including lack of adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to keep their staff safe and a dramatic drop in patient visits, which started to take a huge toll on their bottom lines. Up until this point, few health centers had been conducting visits via telehealth, as they were not previously able to get reimbursed for telephonic and telehealth visits, and many didn’t have the infrastructure set up to be able to offer virtual services. With the prospect of not being able to continue seeing their patients throughout the pandemic, health centers faced an uncertain future.
It was clear that CPCA needed to respond immediately to these urgent needs in order to make sure that our health centers were positioned to safely and effectively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, while also protecting their financial viability. In order to best respond to these needs, we reorganized our work and staff into five PODS that would address different areas of COVID-19 response. This reorganization happened very quickly, literally within a matter of days. CPCA’s rapid response within these new work PODs resulted in big wins for our member health centers, including securing reimbursement for telephonic visits and the relaxation of restrictions for telehealth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, which has allowed health centers to continue to serve their patients in a safe environment throughout the shelter-in-place orders, as well as helping health centers to secure grant funding to supplement revenue losses and support workforce.
Our quick and effective response to address the needs of our members would not have been possible without our partnership with the Regional Clinic Associations of California (RAC) who quickly got to work to assess the impact of the pandemic on the health centers, which included assessing the need for PPE, testing supplies, and technical assistance to address transitioning to telehealth and telephonic visits. The RAC did a wonderful job of addressing the health centers’ operational needs quickly and effectively by helping to place orders for PPE, hand-delivering supplies directly to health center sites, participating in the planning of drive-through testing sites, and serving as a liaison with local public health departments and health systems. The work of the RAC has played a central role in ensuring that California’s health centers are adequately prepared to navigate this crisis.
CPCA is so proud of how we have handled the challenges of COVID-19 as an organization. Our success in transitioning to be a fully virtual workforce and organizing our work so that we could immediately meet the urgent needs of our members is a testament to the amazing senior leadership that we have in place who has overseen all of these changes. We are also thankful to have staff who have been flexible and ready to step into new roles where needed, while also juggling the demands of home and the stress that has accompanied the pandemic. Even though the past four months have been challenging, CPCA has risen to the occasion and we are proud of our accomplishments and the strength that we have gained as an organization.