Resources & Reports

The initial decision to deny a Florida-based telehealth company, RemoteICU (RICU), Medicare payments for telehealth treatment delivered by overseas doctors during the public health emergency (PHE) was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last Tuesday. CCHP has been tracking the case since the lawsuit was first filed by RICU early last year against the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), arguing that restricting reimbursement for telehealth providers out of the country violated federal telehealth waivers requiring Medicare to pay for critical-care services regardless of whether the provider and patient are in different locations. RICU’s contracted physicians are located abroad but do maintain licenses in the United States.

In December, The PEW Charitable Trusts (PEW) released a new report, State Policy Changes Could Increase Access to Opioid Treatment via Telehealth, exploring the benefits of utilizing telehealth to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) and offering states policy recommendations to address telehealth policy barriers that hinder those benefits. The report highlights that research conducted during the pandemic has shown that telehealth-based OUD care improves patient ability to initiate and maintain treatment, in addition to findings that such patients abstain from illicit opioids at the same rates as those that received in-person treatment.

CCHP’s January Newsletter is Here! This month’s topics include: Winter Policy Developments in CCHP’s Telehealth Policy Finder; Revised Version of Medicare 2022 Physician Fee Schedule Available; CMS Medicaid Toolkit Clarifies States Can Reimburse Audio-Only Permanently; Telehealth Among Strategies to Address Customer Experience in New Executive Order; HHS Title X Family Planning Funding to Fuel Telehealth Infrastructure & Capacity; AMA Audio-Only Modifier 93 Effective Jan. 1, 2022; FDA Removes In-Person Requirement for Mifepristone Abortion Pill.

The traction gained by telehealth during the pandemic has raised a number of policy questions. One of the most frequent issues raised revolves around telehealth’s impact on quality of care, but even more so, how to measure quality of care delivered via telehealth. With funding from the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Quality Forum (NQF) convened a stakeholder group between January and October 2021 to create a framework for assessing telehealth impacts on the healthcare system and health outcomes, specifically during emergencies in rural areas. Released in November 2021, the Final Report, Rural Telehealth and Healthcare System Readiness Measurement Framework, recommends primary areas for measurement, such as access and equity, existing measurements that can also be applied, as well as concepts to continue developing and prioritizing moving forward.

As the year winds down, it’s been another eventful one for telehealth policy.  With COVID continuing to impact our daily lives for a second year, telehealth still remains an important tool in providing people with needed health services.  It has also become a time where federal and state policymakers have made or begun the process to make decisions on temporary telehealth policies.  Many of the telehealth policies enacted in response to the pandemic are or were temporary.  Some have expired because they had a specific end date or were tied to a state declaration of a public health emergency.  Other waivers remain, such as the ones for Medicare, because they are tied to the federal public health emergency (PHE) which was renewed October 15, 2021 and extended to January 16, 2022.