Category: Telehealth

Living in a Virtual World: The Post-Pandemic Future of Telehealth

The COVID-19 pandemic required health care providers of all sizes to make drastic changes to the mode of patient care delivery. Telehealth quickly emerged as a safe alternative to in-person patient visits, and many providers quickly transitioned to virtual services. The pandemic-initiated expansion of telehealth was rapid and significant, but the pandemic likely accelerated existing...

CMS Expands Emergency Declaration Blanket Waivers for Health Care Providers

As we described in our prior blog post, on March 30, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) published multiple COVID-19 Blanket Waivers for Health Care Providers. CMS announced another round of Blanket Waivers on April 30, which are available here. These waivers provide additional flexibility to health care providers responding to the...

COVID-19 and Cross-State Clinician Licensure: Federal and State Regulations, Revisited, and What To Do About Them

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased the number of patients and providers seeking to implement and use telehealth visits and other digital health solutions – and rapidly, at that.  The challenge of implementing digital health solutions, particularly telehealth, has historically been the patchwork setup of both federal and various state regulations that made it difficult...

Medicare Telehealth Payment Expanded to Help Address the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency

On March 17, 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”) each issued policy statements which expand access to telehealth services for Medicare beneficiaries and permit physicians and other practitioners to reduce or waive beneficiary cost-sharing obligations for Medicare telehealth...

New HIPAA Waivers for Health Care Providers During the COVID-19 Emergency

This post provides an update on a number of HIPAA waivers that have just been made available to health care providers: (1) Waivers for hospitals in the initial 72 hours of enacting a disaster protocol; and (2) Waivers for all health care providers to allow them to use “everyday communications technologies, such as FaceTime or...

OIG Seeks Public Input on Anti-Kickback Statute and Beneficiary Inducements CMP as part of the “Regulatory Sprint to Coordinated Care”

The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) has identified the anti-kickback statute (AKS) and beneficiary inducements civil monetary penalty (CMP) as potential barriers to arrangements that could promote better patient care coordination and value-based arrangements.  On August 27, 2018, the OIG published a Request for Information (RFI) seeking input...

HIMMS, Chronic Care Management, and the Top 5 Overlooked Items

Harnessing existing digital health solutions to improve chronic care management was a prominent topic at HIMMS this year (amongst many others, including AI and cybersecurity, both of which we will cover in upcoming blog posts). While this is not a new topic, it was particularly “buzzy” this year due to the ever-increasing number of large...

Significant Changes in Healthcare Laws Enacted Through the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018: Stark, Civil and Criminal Penalties, Telehealth, ACOs and More

Overview On February 9, President Trump signed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 (“BBA”) into law. The BBA funds the federal government through March 23 and included a bipartisan agreement to increase annual spending authority for a two-year period. In addition, the legislation contains significant policy changes impacting Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health agencies....