Practice Management Alert
Ensure and Document Consent for Telehealth
Question: When doing a telehealth encounter, do you need to ask for telehealth-specific consent for the patient? Florida Subscriber Answer: During the public health emergency (PHE), many of the regulatory requirements surrounding telehealth encounters were waived, and providers and patients could connect more easily, on widely available platforms like FaceTime, which were not necessarily compliant with Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA). Now that the PHE is ending, stakeholders need to be ready to adjust their practices to remain in compliance — and secure reimbursement. But, to put it bluntly: Yes, you must make sure you have consent in the medical record for a telehealth encounter, says Leonata (Lee) Williams, MBA, RHIA, CPC, CCS, CPCO, CCDS, CEMC, CHONC, CRC. Consent during a telehealth encounter can be an important legal consideration. You should also document properly the audio/visual component of the encounter, which designates the encounter as telehealth, versus an audio-only service. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) suggests following these best practices (follow URL below for more information), regardless of state laws: Congress and federal agencies are still hammering out the details for which aspects of the telehealth-related PHE waivers will become permanent versus which regulations will revert to pre-PHE constraints. Find more about telehealth for providers here, www.cms.gov/ files/document/telehealth-toolkit-providers.pdf.
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