Resources & Reports

Telehealth legislation continues to be introduced at the federal level, including the recently released Telemental Health Access to Care Act and the Connecting Rural Telehealth to the Future Act. On May 26^th a bipartisan group of several U.S. Senators put out a discussion draft of the Telemental Health Access to Care Act as part of the Senate Finance Committee’s work regarding improving mental health access through telehealth. The bill would require Medicare coverage of mental health visits via telehealth by providers, including Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and Rural Health Clinics (RHCs) in certain instances.

As the federally designated National Telehealth Policy Resource Center, CCHP develops educational telehealth policy resources and provides technical assistance to those who have questions regarding state and federal telehealth policies. Recently, the most popular questions CCHP receives revolve around:

1. Licensure exceptions and what state policies are regarding out-of-state providers,
2. How to bill particular payers, primarily Medicare, for services provided via telehealth – including the appropriate billing modifiers and place of service codes to use, and
3. What may potentially lie ahead for permanent telehealth policies post-public health emergency (PHE).

In response to these hot topics, we decided to dedicate this week’s write up to addressing these areas of focus in the hopes of adding some clarity to these sometimes-confusing areas of telehealth policy.

Focus on the relationship between telehealth and disparities in access to care continues to result in new research examining pandemic era data and the use of telehealth among disadvantaged populations. While policymakers and studies often try to put findings into two groups, whether telehealth increases or decreases inequities, recent research shows that the study framework used and considerations made may impact outcomes more so than telehealth itself. For instance, this month a new study published in Health Affairs found that as a result of emergency federal telemedicine coverage expansions access increased for all Medicare populations, including those in the most disadvantaged areas.