The President’s Proposed FY 2021 Budget stresses the need to use technology such as telehealth to transform rural health. So the budget proposes that barriers be removed to using telehealth services in rural and underserved areas.
CMS https://www.cms.gov has expanded the availability of telehealth and communication technology-based services to Medicare beneficiaries and has made changes to expand the availability of telehealth and communication technology-based services in rural areas.
The budget proposal would provide authority for Rural Health Clinics, FQHCs, as well as IHS and tribal facilities to be distant site providers for Medicare telehealth services. This would allow Rural Health Clinics and FQHCs to be eligible for reimbursement for services provided via telehealth.
The FY 2021 budget requests $29 million to provide funds to help HRSA support telehealth services. The funding would be used to promote health services and distance learning with telehealth technologies through the Telehealth Network Grant Program, Telehealth Resource Center program, and the Telehealth Center of Excellence Program.
In FY 2021, HRSA https://www.hrsa.gov will continue the Telehealth Network Grant Program to enable the Tele-Emergency services to provide real time emergency care consultation between a central emergency healthcare center and a distant hospital emergency department.
By modernizing health IT, the IHS https://www.ihs.gov Health Information Technology infrastructure is now able to provide critical support to the IHS, tribal, and urban healthcare system that cares for 2.6 million American Indian and Alaska Native people. The FY 2021 budget proposes investing $125 million to support IHS’s transition to an improved and modernized EHR system
As for future technology needs, the FY 2021 budget would provide $50 million to use artificial intelligence to better understand the underlying causes of chronic diseases and to identify successful early treatments.
NIH https://www.gov would be able to use artificial intelligence and other advanced techniques via the use of computers to learn and improve analytical functions from experience rather than programming which would improve the interpretation of data related to chronic diseases.
Dealing with the complexity and the volume of research data generated by NIH continues to rapidly increase. NIH is focused on catalyzing new capabilities in biomedical data science by modernizing their data resource system.
In support of the use of cloud systems to access data, NIH is moving high priority datasets to Google and Amazon Web Services. The FY 2021 proposed budget would to support the use of systems to compute across diverse datasets in the cloud environment.
Go to https://hhs.gov/sites/default/files/fy-2021-budget-in-brief.pdf to view the proposed FY 2021 Budget in Brief.