Resources & Reports

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.

While 2020 saw unprecedented utilization of telehealth due to the COVID-19 pandemic and many new flexibilities put into place through executive orders and administrative policies, 2021 was the year that all states grappled with permanent telehealth legislative changes in some form and the majority enacted at least one bill related to telehealth. Whether it was related to expanding reimbursement in Medicaid or private payers, establishing telehealth practice standards or addressing cross-state licensing issues through special registration processes or Compacts changes were made. A larger quantity of bills in 2021 moved through legislatures to become law more successfully than any single year prior.

In late September, the nomination of Christi Grimm as Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS-OIG) was considered in a hearing before the United States Senate Committee on Finance. As the future of telehealth policy is front of mind for lawmakers, the HHS-OIG Official Responses to Questions for the Record (QFRs) posted on the Committee’s website contain a number of questions and responses that showcase the important role of HHS-OIG in terms of the future of telehealth policy while also providing a clear explanation of OIG’s view on a range of telehealth issues.

The Medicare Payment and Access Commission (MedPAC) recently met to provide updated Medicare telehealth utilization data, which highlights a decrease in use since the beginning of the pandemic, but also shows that utilization remains higher than prior to the pandemic. Earlier this year MedPAC published recommendations to Congress to further extend some federal COVID expansions related to telehealth in order to gather more data to inform long-term policies…