State Telehealth Activity
New Herald News: Gov. Pritzker Signs Landmark Legislation Expanding Telehealth Access (7/22) – Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed House Bill 3308 into law, which will increase access to telehealth services in communities across the state. The bill prevents a gap in coverage by permanently extending the payment parity requirement for mental health and substance use disorder services enacted during the pandemic, and authorizes other telehealth services to be covered through 2027. The legislation also prevents insurance plans from requiring an in-person visit before a telehealth services is provided.
mHealth Intelligence: Four Strategies for Solving the Telehealth Licensure Debate (7/22) – Telehealth licensure has long been a barrier to connected health adoption, largely due to state variation in licensing requirements and regulations. Emergency flexibilities enacted during the pandemic that allowed providers to use telehealth to treat patients in other states without the need to get a license in that state are now expiring. This article explores various options for tackling cross-state licensure. Including various licensure compacts and licensure reciprocity. The author outlined the Alliance for Connected Care’s Medical Excellence Zone concept, which would create a region or collection of states that would allow providers to practice telehealth across state lines as long as they were licensed and in good standing in one state in the Zone. On licensure, the Alliance says, “One of the biggest barriers to telehealth becoming a regular patient and provider choice is the administrative burden caused by the variation in licensure requirements from state to state.”
WSPA: Telehealth use doubles for people seeking drug addiction counseling services (7/21) – Counselors at the Phoenix Center in Greenville, South Carolina said the amount of people utilizing their telehealth option for addiction counseling at their facility has doubled since 2020. Last year, 400 people were meeting with their counselors virtually and this year that number has risen to over 800 people, and that’s due to relaxed federal laws during the PHE. Overall, individual sessions at The Phoenix Center have quadrupled over the last year. “We’re a pretty large county [Greenville] and so people who may have had to drive from Marietta, Travelers Rest, Greer or Simpsonville can now access their counselor from home. Even on their lunch break at work. We’ve had people on vacation that would call in to see their counselors through telehealth,” McLain.
mHealth Intelligence: A California FQHC Plots its Path to Telehealth and RPM Sustainability (7/20) – The Northeast Valley Health Corporation (NEVHC), a California-based FQHC, has launched a remote patient monitoring platform aimed at addressing some of the biggest barriers to care faced by its patients. Implementing and adopting such tools and telehealth services will help the FQHC address the digital divide and provide essential health care services to patients, regardless of insurance status.
|