Make Medicare telehealth coverage national and keep patients at home

Medicare telehealth used to be a narrow benefit, largely confined to rural patients and, even then, often requiring an in-person “originating site” visit just to log on.

In this Physicians Practice interview, Anders Gilberg, senior vice president of government affairs at the Medical Group Management Association, says the two reforms worth locking in are simple: extend coverage beyond rural areas and permanently allow patients to receive telehealth from home.

Physicians Practice: Staying on telehealth, if you were “God Emperor Anders” of the U.S., what rules would you lock in permanently, and why?

Anders Gilberg: Before COVID, Me dicare telehealth coverage outside of rural areas was extremely limited. A lot of people don’t even remember that, but it wasn’t broadly covered.

And even in rural areas, if a patient needed telehealth, say they needed to connect with a specialist in another city, maybe a subspecialist for a rare disease, they still had to go to an originating site. It had to be a HIPAA-secured location, so they’d literally have to go into a physician’s office or another approved site just to have a telehealth visit with another physician.

So there are two big changes that the flexibilities introduced.

One: basic coverage outside rural areas. That’s critical, because so much of the country isn’t rural, and patients everywhere benefit from this.

Two: allowing the patient to receive care in their home rather than requiring an originating site. If the flexibilities are extended, rural patients in particular won’t be forced into that extra step, and patients everywhere get more realistic access to telehealth.

Those are the two big ones I would lock in.