The Office of Inspector General within HHS (HHS-OIG) https://oig.hhs.gov is conducting oversight work assessing telehealth services, including the impact of public health emergency flexibilities.
Once these telehealth reviews are completed, the findings and recommendations will be available in a report to policymakers and other stakeholders.
HHS-OIG will work with the other members on the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) to produce the report describing the types of telehealth services that are available, including those that were expanded during the pandemic.
HHS-OIG will conduct an evaluation with information from the Departments of Defense, Justice, Labor, Veterans Affairs, and the Office of Personnel Management. The report will provide policymakers and stakeholders with foundational information about the nature of telehealth across select Federal healthcare programs and related program integrity risks in order to foresee the use of telehealth in the future.
The understanding is that while the expansion of telehealth has been critical to maintaining beneficiaries’ access to care, it is important that new policies and technologies with potential to improve care and enhance access are not compromised by fraud, abuse, or misused.
HHS-OIG along with law enforcement partners, have participated in a coordinated law enforcement action to combat COVID-19 related healthcare fraud. As reported, twenty one defendants in nine federal districts across the U.S were charged for their alleged participation in various healthcare fraud schemes. These schemes exploited the pandemic resulting in over $149 million in false billings. Defendants included telemedicine companies, physicians, marketers, and medical supply owners.
On March 2022, OIG published a Data Brief which documents that telehealth was critical for providing services to 28 million Medicare beneficiaries during the first year of the pandemic. In total, beneficiaries used 88 times more telehealth services during the first year of the pandemic than they used the prior year. Beneficiaries’ use of telehealth peaked in April 2020 and remained high through early 2021.
Beneficiaries also used telehealth for a larger share of their behavioral health services as compared to their use of telehealth for other services. Specifically, beneficiaries used telehealth for 43% of behavioral health services but they used telehealth for 13% of office visits.