Telehealth News and Market Developments
NBC Washington: MedStar Health to Expand Use of Tech That Monitors Patients from Their Homes (5/4) – Alliance Member MedStar Health is expanding its remote patient monitoring services to serve greater numbers of primary care patients, including those with chronic conditions such as hypertension, congestive heart failure and diabetes. Remote patient monitoring can make room and provide more resources for high-risk patients in the hospital. "The vital signs that are collected by those devices are displayed to that critical care team to create alerts to suggest to that clinical care team, hey, here’s a number that’s problematic. This patient needs your attention. Follow up," Medical Director of the MedStar Telehealth Innovation Center Dr. Ethan Booker said.
Inside Telehealth: PCORnet Plan To Create ASL Category Might Spur Use Of Sign Language In Telehealth (5/4) – The Patient-Center Clinical Outcomes Research Network (PCORnet) plans to change its current designation of American Sign Language (ASL) as an “other” spoken language in its data model and create a specific category for patients who use ASL. With the rapid increase in telehealth utilization since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lack of telemedicine accessibility for ASL users has received attention from providers and researchers. Options for making telehealth videoconferencing accessible to deaf patients can include remote interpreting services that translate calls into ASL, real-time captioning by a qualifier captioner, or routing the call through a third-party relay service.
Inside Telehealth: Insurance Coverage Hikes Telehealth Revenue but Takes Time for Approval (5/4) – Telehealth platforms that accept insurance have higher revenue than those that require payment directly from consumers because insurance coverage caters to a larger patient population. Getting coverage approved under government and private plans can take up to a year and the lengthy process can strain new businesses. Participating with government health plans, like Medicare, Medicaid and Medicare Advantage, can be a way for telehealth companies to be adequately reimbursed.
Modern Healthcare: Providers bridge language barriers in telehealth (5/3) – Patients who don't speak English or who have limited English skills can run into challenges when seeking care via telehealth, despite federal protections. Patients can hit roadblocks from the moment they seek care, from scheduling an appointment, to getting onto the telehealth software, to bringing a medical interpreter into the visit. To make telehealth more accessible, telehealth companies are looking to develop information on what telehealth is and instructions for how to access a telehealth platform in patients' preferred languages.
Inside Telehealth: Asynchronous Telemental Health Care Could Help Fix Provider Shortage (5/3) – Telemental health experts said that online care options could be the solution to health care workforce shortages and rising workforce burnout concerns, but policies and reimbursement could be slow to catch up to industry innovation. Asynchronous telemental therapy options could help maximize providers’ capacity to see patients, lighten providers’ workloads by redistributing tasks that do not require qualified mental health providers’ expertise, and help with unmet needs, either because in-person care is inaccessible or because patients prefer to receive care via telehealth. Asynchronous telemental screenings are best used to triage patients’ specific needs and better pair them with providers, which helps patients receive the care they need and helps make the best use of providers’ time and mental energy.
Forbes: How Far Has Telehealth Actually Come? (5/2) – Most measures of telehealth effectiveness today focus on access to care and patient satisfaction, with a significant number of respondents lacking any measures for assessing the value of telehealth. For many organizations that have invested in telehealth, the focus is on sustaining existing telehealth programs and integrating them seamlessly with in-person care for a move toward a hybrid model. The expansion of telehealth to a broader range of health care services or toward more comprehensive enterprise adoption partly depends on the reimbursement landscape and government policy. Telehealth legislation must encourage further investments in telehealth.
Health Affairs: Policy Considerations to Ensure Telemedicine Equity (5/2) – The process of designing permanent, post-pandemic telehealth policies must center on equity. Because of the predominance of fee-for-service models, many ongoing conversations have centered on determining the exact value (and reimbursement) for telemedicine services based on specific details of the interaction, such as the service being provided or the location of the patient or clinician, to design rules that encourage only “appropriate” telemedicine use. Assigning uniform payment levels for these services (thereby implying uniform utility for each patient) makes it difficult to ensure equity, as each patient has unique needs. As more data becomes available, policy makers should reevaluate explicit efforts to improve telehealth equity in permanent telehealth policies.
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