Congress Extends Flexible Telehealth Rules Past Official End of COVID Public Health Emergency

For some time now, special pandemic rules have been in effect which allowed providers to offer various forms of government-funded telehealth. However, if no action was taken to head this off, these rules were due to expire with the official end of the COVID-19 public health emergency.

The American Telehealth Association has been pushing Congress to avoid having these options end immediately after the PHE ends, a result the ATA describes as having them fall off the “telehealth cliff.”

Apparently, the ATA’s lobbying efforts paid off. With the passage of the omnibus spending bill funding the federal government through October 1 of this year, Congress has extended the life of rules allowing for such flexibility for at least five months after the official expiration of the PHE.

These special flexibilities include the following:

  • Medicare beneficiaries will still be able to receive telehealth services from any geographic location including their home
  • An expanded list of practitioners will be allowed to receive Medicare funds for telehealth services, including physical therapists, occupational therapists, special therapists and audiologists
  • Federally Qualified Health Centers and Rural Healthcare clinics will be able to offer telehealth services for the next several months, the mental health is its
  • Mental health providers will not be required to see their patients in person before conducting a telehealth-based mental health visit.
  • Medicare will continue to cover audio-only services
  • High Deductible Health Plans will continue to be able to offer the telehealth services pre-deductible for the remainder of the 2022 plan year.

This news of this like the extension came to me in a celebratory press release from the ATA. As you can imagine, the ATA hopes to see Congress update telehealth policy to be sure that expanded telehealth options will be put in place permanently.

Speaking as a patient, I can only hope that Congress does indeed extend these flexibilities even beyond the current extension. It seems to me that Medicare and other federal agencies must have enough data at this point to have a good idea of whether their policy objectives are being met by giving telehealth providers more options.

I could be wrong, but if anything decidedly negative had come up during the pandemic and suggested that telehealth wasn’t working as promised, I think it’s likely we would have heard something about it by now.

The truth is that allowing possibly infirm Medicare patients to get to the doctors whether or not they are mobile simply makes a lot of sense.  In fact, offering the elderly telemedicine services for at least some conditions seems very logical.

In any event, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and HHS are currently analyzing the utilization of telehealth among beneficiaries and plan to feed that research to Congress as members make decisions as to what types of telehealth options will be set in stone. This doesn’t sound like much of a commitment, but government policy developing goes this is a decidedly progressive step.

In any event, count me among those in the general public who would like to see telehealth extended as far as it can go. Particularly where the potentially home-bound elderly are concerned, it can do a world of good.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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