Home Health & Hospice Week

Telehealth seems to be gaining ground as a politically popular idea, but it won’t all be smooth sailing if the feds expand the practice to include home care sites. The HHS Office of Inspector General already has focused on current telehealth billing — and found significant problems.

After auditing claims for telehealth, the OIG discovered a major location fee discrepancy, it says in its latest Semiannual Report to Congress. This is important since the popular service has exploded, with Medicare payments skyrocketing from $61,302 in 2001 to $17.6 million in 2015, the agency says.

“Medicare telehealth payments include a professional fee, paid to the practitioner performing the service at a distant site, and an originating-site fee, paid to the facility where the beneficiary receives the service,” the OIG notes. “We analyzed 2014 and 2015 ... telehealth claims and found that more than half ... did not have matching originating site facility fee claims.”