“Are You on the Phone Track, Are You on the Video Track, Are You on the In-Person Track?”: Outpatient Healthcare Social Workers’ Experiences with Telehealth

Since its rapid scale-up at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth has become an established and pervasive modality of engagement in outpatient healthcare. There is minimal literature on its use by healthcare social workers, who expand across myriad roles and types of practice. The purpose of this article is to explore outpatient healthcare social workers' experiences with telehealth and their perceptions about its effect on their patients, particularly safety net populations. Semistructured interviews addressing effects of telehealth utilization on social workers, their practice, and their patients were completed with outpatient healthcare social workers (N = 21) from two urban medical centers. Three overarching themes emerged from thematic analysis: (1) telehealth facilitators and challenges to access; (2) telehealth's positive and negative effects on engagement, assessment, and intervention; and (3) telehealth work satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Results illustrate the need for increasing discernment for the benefit of patients to delineate paths of engagement through video, phone, hybrid, or in-person modalities by assessing the types of contextual factors identified by study participants.