Posts

Let’s Operate on Interoperability

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Wednesday, MedCity News and Life as a Healthcare CIO ran what I believe to be a very important piece on interoperability by Dr. John D. Halamka. I don’t agree with him that attempts to legislate interoperability into being should be jettisoned completely, but most of his points ring true.

Early on he asks the question that SHOULD be core to the HIT and Telemedicine industries, but especially for EHR vendors: “So what is our next step to help providers…to the point that Congress no longer wants to legislate the solution to the problem?” Read more

Hoping CMS’ Proposed ACO Rules Get Better

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CMS helping a bit

Recently, CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) released a proposal of new rulemaking asking for comments on easing “telehealth” requirements for ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations). You can find a wonderful press release here from the ATA (American Telemedicine Association), who was instrumental in getting CMS to reconsider their earlier rules.

Having reviewed the proposal, I had to remind myself that CMS (and, ultimately, the Department of Health and Human Services) is to actually very committed to enabling greater adoption of telehealth, and that their final rules have historically been heavily modified from their proposals. Having said that–and I’m no doctor or lawyer–but I felt this proposal to use waivers rather than simply waiving antiquated requirements just adds red tape where there shouldn’t be any. Does anyone else get that sense?

First, a quick statement of why s Read more

Maybe You Can get Reimbursed for That…

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Treasure In Paper

Last week I posted a press release from the ATA about expanded Medicare coverage for Telemedicine.  Well, I decided to actually read the 1200 page rulemaking from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).  You can guess why it’s taken a week to write a follow up article…

Actually, no.  I didn’t read the entire rulemaking, only the pages relevant to all things “tele” in medicine and healthcare.  In doing so, I was reminded of something interesting:

There are a number of procedures already covered by Medicare without specific telemedicine codes.  In fact, of the seven bullet points listing the 22 codes rejected or deleted from inclusion, five noted the affected codes were largely unnecessary due to either an existing telehealth code or because Medicare does not distinguish whether the procedure is tele or not.

Here are a few examples:

Regarding electrocardiograms and echocardiograms: “By definition, Read more