Home Health & Hospice Week

Advocates for home health agencies are try, trying again to gain some equity regarding telehealth.

Longtime home health advocate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has introduced S. 1309, a bill that would allow HHAs to count telehealth visits as in-person ones under a public health emergency. The legislation is an update from a previous version introduced last year, notes the national Association for Home Care & Hospice in its member newsletter.

“To assuage [fraud and abuse] concerns, guardrails were added that would require for patient consent for telehealth services, as well as a requirement that telehealth visits can comprise of no more than half of all visits,” NAHC points out. “The bill will also require a pre-existing relationship between the patient and ordering physician for the patient to be eligible to receive reimbursable telehealth services.”

Medicare’s failure to directly reimburse HHAs for telehealth visits by allowing them to count toward low utilization payment adjustment thresholds, etc., “has become a glaring shortcoming in the era of the coronavirus pandemic,” NAHC criticizes.