Medicare reimbursement for telehealth services is notoriously patchy. Much to the chagrin of telehealth vendors and healthcare providers, and despite many attempts to change the status quo through legislation, CMS still has a lot of restrictions on the geography of users and provider (rural versus urban, at home versus at a clinic, etc.) and on the technology used (video is reimburseable, for...
On its fourth quarter earnings call, Teladoc reported increases in total visits, utilization, and revenues, but also in net loss. CEO Jason Gorevic was optimistic, pointing to positive developments in Washington and the success of the platform during this year's worse-than-normal flu service.
Teladoc’s full-year revenue for 2017 was $77 million, a 106 percent increase from 2016. Net loss, however...
The Center for Connected Health Policy has released the fifth edition of its State Telehealth Laws and Reimbursement Policies Report. CCHP uncovered many notable findings in the new report. Perhaps chief among those: 48 states and Washington, D.C., provide reimbursement for some form of live video in Medicaid fee-for-service.
Specifically, 13 states reimburse for store-and-forward delivered...
More and more health insurers are encouraging members to seek out video visits with physicians by subsidizing or outright covering such services. The latest to commit to the trend is Independence Blue Cross, which serves 2.5 million customers in the Philadelphia area and another 7.5 million across the country.
Independence will offer telemedicine to its members in two ways — both through a...
The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) has released the latest edition of its telemedicine state-by-state score card reports. There’s good news and bad news. In the area of coverage and reimbursement, 11 states and the District of Columbia saw their grades improve since September 2014, when ATA released the first editions of these reports, and only two saw their grades decline. But in the...
An American Well video visit.
The American Medical Association has begun the process of creating a host of new CPT codes to support the reimbursement of telemedicine. A working group tasked with generating such a list met for the first time last week.
CPT stands for "Current Procedural Terminology" and the codes are used by healthcare providers and insurers to communicate the nature of...
This week the American Telemedicine Association's annual event is taking place in Los Angeles and apart from the important pair of policy-focused reports the ATA published (more on that below), the other news coming out of the event so far is that American Well has expanded its scope and is now working to convince physicians to use its platform to connect with their existing patients.
While...
A survey by the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP of 57 executives at provider organizations found a healthy interest in telemedicine, but that concrete adoption is still in the early stages, and possibly more than a decade away.
Only 3 percent of respondents considered telemedicine unimportant to their organizations. Fifty-two percent found it very important and 32 percent said it was important...
Most healthcare practitioners are either using telemedicine or planning to use it soon, but less than a fifth of them are being paid for those services.
That's according to a survey recently conducted at the Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine (AIHM) annual conference in San Diego. AIHM surveyed 754 practitioners, 78 percent of whom were physicians. Neither the academy nor the conference...
Recent MobiHealthNews interview subject Proteus Duxbury, director of technology strategy for virtual health services at Englewood, Colo.-based Catholic Health Initiatives, told me that lack of insurance reimbursement is holding back wider adoption of digital technologies. "A lot of [provider] organizations are going to start pulling the plug on some digital health initiatives for that reason,"...
