Home Health & Hospice Week

The HHS Office of Inspector General is eyeing telehealth visits during COVID-19, and the results could inform what happens with home health agency and hospice remote visits.

A recent report from the OIG doesn’t single out HHA and hospice remote visits, but the general telehealth trends could prove enlightening.

“While the expansion of telehealth has been essential to maintaining beneficiaries’ access to care, there have been concerns about the potential for fraud, waste, and abuse associated with expanded telehealth services,” the OIG says. “These data are critical to informing decisions about how to structure telehealth services in Medicare on a more permanent basis.”

About 84 percent of Medicare beneficiaries received all their telehealth services during COVID from providers with whom they had an established relationship, the OIG says in the new study.

The type of visit where the fewest benes had preexisting relationships with the provider — 58 percent — were home visits, the OIG notes. The watchdog agency defines “home

visits” as evaluation and management services provided by a physician to a beneficiary in their private residence, not requiring a homebound designation.

For remote patient monitoring visits, 77 percent of beneficiaries had a preexisting relationship with the provider before their visit.

See more data in the six-page report at https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-20-00521.pdf.