A U.S. House committee unanimously passed a bill Sept. 18 that would extend the hospital-at-home program and telehealth flexibilities.The Telehealth Modernization Act of 2024 moved out of the Committee on Energy and Commerce and will now go before the full House. The legislation, which would be funded by pharmacy benefit manager reform, would continue the CMS hospital-at-home waiver for five years […]
Summary PointsThe Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released its annual proposed rule updating the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) for calendar year (CY) 2025.1The proposed rule includes various provisions related to telehealth service delivery and other virtual care modalities. Similar to recent proposed rules, many of the provisions seek to extend temporary telehealth and virtual care flexibilities […]
As the adoption of telehealth, remote monitoring, and connected care technologies continues to increase, it’s important for healthcare leaders to stay on top of the latest updates in telehealth reimbursement. Some of the most significant updates come from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which released its final rule for Medicare payments under the Physician Fee […]
If you are a medical professional interested in leveraging remote technology to optimize patient health, this guide outlines remote therapeutic monitoring codes for 2024 and how to bill using RTM CPT codes. Remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM) is similar to remote patient monitoring. However, RTM is used to acquire non-physiological patient data for the respiratory and musculoskeletal […]
February 15, 2024 Anne Dwyer This month, CMS released an updated State Medicaid and CHIP Telehealth Toolkit consolidating information from previous toolkits and providing additional guidance – as required by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act – on issues from billing best practices to strategies for using telehealth in schools. In addition to FAQs on issues such as benefit flexibility, financing, […]
Hospitals across the nation are facing financial constraints and unprecedented staffing shortages. This situation is compounded by the growing need to provide skilled, resource-intensive care for sicker patients being admitted to hospitals’ general care units. This situation is not only impacting clinical staff, who are overworked, stretched thin and reporting high levels of burnout, but […]
The next generation of healthcare will have a face that will likely be much different than anything seen before. The push to rapid innovation, especially in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic, resulted in solutions that provided new outlook in the way healthcare is supervised. As all the industries adjusted to working remotely, healthcare has been more benefitted […]
In November 2023, CMS issued final rules for the 2024 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) and the 2024 Medicare Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS). Both of these rules contained finalized policy proposals that will impact rural health clinics (RHCs) beginning in January 2024: Telehealth Flexibilities CMS has officially extended some telehealth flexibilities that were allowed […]
The 2024 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule final rule, released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) earlier this month, extended certain telehealth-related flexibilities that were implemented during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. CMS issued a Fact Sheet summarizing the telehealth updates, as well as other important Medicare policy changes. Until 2020, Medicare reimbursed […]
Changes to the Medicare Telehealth Services List Structure and Updates Process Prior to the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) evaluated changes to the Medicare Telehealth Services List (the List) through an annual rulemaking process. Through this process, CMS considered whether a service met one of two criteria […]
In a letter submitted to the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health for a hearing Nov. 14, the AHA expressed support for the CONNECT Act (S.2016/H.R. 4189) and urged Congress to allow Medicare beneficiaries to access telehealth services wherever they and their providers are and allow rural health clinics, federally qualified health centers and critical access hospitals to serve as […]
AHA on Oct. 10 voiced support for the CONNECT for Health Act (S. 2016/H.R. 4189), legislation that would increase patient access to telehealth services while removing barriers to adoption. The bill would permanently remove geographic restrictions that limit where patients can access telehealth, add homes and other clinically appropriate originating sites, and allow rural health […]
Washington, D.C., September 18, 2023 – The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) announced this week that its CEO’s Advisory Group on Using Telehealth to Eliminate Disparities and Inequities is releasing three new tools this week, to inform ways in which telehealth can impact disparities and inequities. “We launched the advisory group in 2021 to address the unique ways telehealth could be […]