House Ways and Means Committee Health Subcommittee’s Charting the Path Forward for Telehealth hearing was held in April. Joel White, Executive Director of the Health Innovation Alliance (HIA) https://health-innovation.org, speaking at the hearing, agrees that one of the top priorities is to improve care by expanding telehealth.
Joel White’s testimony mentioned a number of reform recommendations such as:
- Medicare beneficiaries can continue to receive care remotely once the public health emergency ends
- Ensure appropriate tools and incentives are implemented to safeguard taxpayers and patients from fraud or overutilization while transitioning to value-based models of care delivery and reimbursements.
- Congress should eliminate geographic requirements for care to expand telehealth to treat beneficiaries, deal with outdated medical licensing systems, and put limits on account-based plans
- Allow more sites and providers to use telehealth to treat beneficiaries remotely such as FQHCs and rural health clinics
- Allow the remote authorization of dialysis through telehealth technologies instead of requiring an in-person visit
- The START Act of 2021 requires CMS to cover at home COVID testing. The bill would pay for at home diagnostic testing and provide telehealth to ensure patients can receive advice
- Many behavioral health providers responded to the COVID crisis by shifting outpatient services online to allow prescribing controlled substances via telemedicine and advance dispensing of certain medication assisted treatments. Congress should preserve these gains.
- Underserved populations in rural, suburban, and urban communities often lack access to care but may have to rely on broadband, so Congress needs to fund nationwide access to broadband
- Congress should also codify audio-only policies and risk adjust MA payments for audio only care
- Use data inherent to telehealth technologies to improve program integrity to advance analytics and AI.
Many large employer plans operate in multiple states with vast contracted networks of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. Address the fact that care can’t be delivered via telehealth to employees of the same employer without licensing the provider in multiples states.
Joel White concluded, “HIA urges Congress to analyze the data and pass permanent policies to ensure that this type of technology-enabled care is available for years to come where it is greatly needed.”