Telehealth continues to maintain its popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now a new bipartisan bill aims to expand telehealth following the pandemic.
We can help your practice stay on top of the latest healthcare news, rules, regulations and trends. Subscribe to stay current and up to date on important matters that will impact your practice. (To subscribe to our blog click here).
The new bill, Protecting Access to Post-COVID-19 Telehealth Act of 2021, recognizes the recent growth of telehealth and would help to safeguard access to virtual care after the pandemic.
The main provisions of the bill would:
- Eliminate some geographic and originating site restrictions for telehealth in Medicare and establish the patient’s home as an eligible distant site;
- Authorize CMS to continue reimbursement for telehealth for 90 days after the end of the public health emergency;
- Make the disaster waiver authority permanent, which would allow HHS to expand telehealth in future emergencies; and
- Require a study on telehealth during COVID.
Advocates for the bill state that it would help older adults continue to get their required medical care.
An earlier version of the bill was stopped after being referred to a committee.
Many physician practices started offering telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic and have begun to look to more permanent telehealth solutions, to continue offering telehealth appointments after the pandemic.
The temporary waivers surrounding telehealth allowed many practices to test out telehealth to see if it was a viable offering for their practice.
Now, many practices are working on establishing more secure and permanent telehealth platforms to be able to continue providing telehealth appointments.
We help our clients update their policies and procedures, perform risk assessments, and select the best path forward to offer secure telehealth appointments.
Let us know if you’ve used telehealth at your office! Will you continue to offer telehealth appointments following COVID-19?
In our next blog post, we will keep you informed of related issues. To get this important information delivered directly to your mail box, click here to Subscribe.
Do you need help staying current and compliant with the latest laws, rules and regulations? We can help. To contact us about new government rules and regulations, your practice’s risk assessment, or about your other legal needs: CLICK HERE.
