Telehealth in the Time of COVID

This week, Health Affairs published an article by CMS Administrator, Seema Verma, which chronicles the changes in Medicare’s telehealth coverage policies and discusses the current but “temporarily expanded the types of health care providers that can offer telehealth to broaden patient access to care.”  Side note - we hope that some of these coverage policies will become permanent.

The article indicates that “[b]efore the public health emergency, approximately 13,000 beneficiaries in fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare received telemedicine in a week. In the last week of April, nearly 1.7 million beneficiaries received telehealth services. In total, over 9 million beneficiaries have received a telehealth service during the public health emergency, mid-March through mid-June. Specifically, data points presented in this section of the post are from internal CMS analysis of Medicare FFS claims data from March 17through June 13, 2020 (using data processed through June 19, 2020). Telemedicine services include services on the Medicare telehealth list including audio-only visits, as well as virtual check-ins and e-visits.”