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Post By: Adam Turteltaub
The pandemic may, please, finally, we hope, be coming to an end. That’s great cause for celebration, but it also portends a period of adjustment for healthcare, according to Raul G. Ordonez (LinkedIn), Associate Vice President for Compliance at Jackson Health System.
Telehealth, which exploded during the Public Health Emergency (PHE), is likely to see several changes.
As he explains in this podcast, before the pandemic telehealth was largely limited to underserved rural areas. When the emergency began, though, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which has latitude in determining which services were allowed and who was eligible, allowed for hundreds of new codes for telehealth that are reimbursable for Medicare patients. Eligibility was expanded to patients all over the US, even those seeing a doctor from their own homes.
Once the PHE ends, CMS has stated that many of the waivers for telehealth services will also come to an end. While there will be a notable exception for many mental health services, the end of the vast majority of waivers calls for compliance teams to start planning for a very different future than the present climate. And, they must do so at a time in which the US federal government has a keen eye on False Claims cases and the OIG, as a part of its workplan, will be looking at a host of telehealth-related items.
Listen in to learn more about how to prepare for the upcoming, new era in telehealth.