National Telehealth Organizations and Associations
The telehealth landscape is shaped not just by technology and clinical practice, but by the organizations that set standards, lobby for policy, train providers, and publish the research that moves the field forward. This page maps the major national organizations and professional associations operating in the US telehealth space — what they do, how they differ, and when their work becomes directly relevant to patients, providers, and policymakers alike.
Definition and scope
A national telehealth organization, in the broadest sense, is any nonprofit, professional association, government-affiliated body, or multi-stakeholder coalition whose primary or significant focus is advancing telehealth policy, practice, or access across the United States. That umbrella covers a surprisingly wide range of entities — from specialty associations that added telehealth committees to their existing structure, to organizations built entirely around remote care from the ground up.
The American Telemedicine Association (ATA), founded in 1993, is the most prominent standalone advocacy and membership organization in this category. It represents hospitals, health systems, technology vendors, insurers, and individual clinicians, and it publishes practice guidelines that carry real weight in credentialing and telehealth policy and regulation discussions at the federal level.
The Center for Connected Health Policy (CCHP), a federally designated National Telehealth Policy Resource Center, functions differently — less as a membership body and more as a research and policy clearinghouse. CCHP tracks telehealth state laws and licensure changes across all 50 states and publishes quarterly policy briefs used extensively by state Medicaid programs and legislative staff.
Beyond these two anchors, the landscape includes:
- HRSA Office for the Advancement of Telehealth — a federal body within the Health Resources and Services Administration that funds Telehealth Resource Centers (TRCs) distributed across 12 regional zones plus 2 national centers with specialized focus areas (telehealth technology assessment and policy).
- National Consortium of Telehealth Resource Centers (NCTRC) — the coordinating umbrella for those 14 HRSA-funded TRCs, providing provider training, technical assistance, and rural access programs.
- Alliance for Connected Care — a coalition-style advocacy group focused specifically on federal reimbursement policy, particularly Medicare telehealth coverage flexibilities and controlled substance prescribing rules.
- Telehealth Accreditation Program (TAP) under URAC — an accreditation body rather than an advocacy group, offering formal standards-based certification for telehealth programs operated by health plans and provider organizations.
How it works
These organizations exert influence through four main channels: policy advocacy, clinical standard-setting, research dissemination, and direct technical assistance to providers.
On the advocacy side, the ATA and Alliance for Connected Care maintain Washington, DC presences and engage directly with Congress and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) during rulemaking comment periods. When CMS proposes changes to the list of Medicare-covered telehealth services — which it does through the annual Physician Fee Schedule rulemaking process — these organizations submit formal comments and often coordinate coalition letters signed by dozens of health systems and specialty societies.
Standard-setting looks different. The ATA has published practice guidelines covering mental health telehealth, store-and-forward telehealth, and remote patient monitoring, among other modalities. These aren't legally binding, but they influence how hospitals credential telehealth providers and how malpractice insurers assess coverage — two pressure points that shape actual clinical behavior faster than most regulations.
CCHP's work feeds directly into state policy. Its 50-state tracker of Medicaid coverage policies, private payer parity laws, and telehealth informed consent requirements is cited regularly in state legislative analyses and is one of the few places where a provider can get a consolidated view of how rules differ across state lines.
The HRSA TRC network operates on the ground level, running webinars, offering initial consultations to rural clinics, and helping small practices navigate telehealth billing and coding — the kind of operational friction that slows adoption more reliably than any policy debate.
Common scenarios
A rural federally qualified health center in Montana needs to launch a telepsychiatry program. The regional TRC — in this case, the Northwest Regional Telehealth Resource Center — provides no-cost technical assistance on platform selection, workflow design, and how to structure consent documentation compliant with Montana's specific rules.
A hospital system's legal team is reviewing credentialing standards for a new specialist telemedicine service. They pull ATA practice guidelines as a benchmark because those documents are defensible in front of accreditors and insurers, even where no statute mandates their use.
A state Medicaid director's office is drafting coverage expansion language for chronic disease telehealth management. Staff reference CCHP's policy briefs to understand how neighboring states have structured similar programs without triggering unintended billing complications.
A health technology company is seeking validation for a new remote patient monitoring platform. URAC's TAP accreditation provides third-party credibility that matters to hospital procurement committees evaluating vendors.
Decision boundaries
Not every organization in this space carries the same authority or serves the same purpose, and conflating them leads to real confusion.
The ATA is a membership and advocacy body — its guidelines represent expert consensus but carry no regulatory force. CCHP is an independent policy research center — its analyses describe what laws exist, not what those laws should be. HRSA's TRCs provide technical assistance to providers, not to patients seeking care. URAC offers accreditation to programs, not endorsements of specific technologies.
For providers navigating telehealth post-pandemic policy changes, the distinction matters practically: ATA's advocacy positions may reflect what the field wants policy to become, while CCHP's state trackers reflect what the law actually is at any given moment. Treating one as the other is the kind of mistake that surfaces during a payer audit or a licensure review — quietly, and at the worst possible time.