Abstract This study explores how crisis‐driven workarounds can frame innovation. Given scheduling and website constraints, health center managers repurposed health center web pages to surface telehealth options. Planned Parenthood Federation of America leveraged these adaptations as prototypes and formalized them into a scalable model: Virtual Health Centers. These centers reduced operational burden and appointment lead times, and increased booked appointments, and stabilized access during clinic closures and rising demand for telehealth. The case extends user‐led innovation by specifying crisis as a generative constraint: it reveals failure points, legitimizes local experimentation, and sharpens product scope and decision support beyond top‐down roadmaps. It shows how staff improvisation, when institutionalized, can rapidly reconfigure digital infrastructure to meet urgent patient needs. These insights generalize to telehealth teams and organizations operating amid fragmented regulation and high costs.
McMillan et al. (Sat,) studied this question.