JANUARY 2001 PRESS RELEASE
Reactions To Medicare Telemedicine Reimbursement Legislation
January 16, 2001 (Jacksonville, OR): A combined budget bill passed in late December 2000 will increase Medicare payments to health maintenance organizations over the next five years while also expanding Medicare reimbursement for telemedicine in a variety of care settings. Robin Wiley (Wiley And Company; Alexandria VA) notes that: "Specific provisions of the legislation clarify the eligibility of telehomecare technologies as an option for providing services under home health prospective payment."
There are ongoing concerns, however, about what the complex language of the bill really means. The confusion arises from the stipulation that services provided via telehomecare are not to be considered as in-person home care visits for purposes of Medicare reimbursement. For health care providers, conducting the minimum number of in-person visits specified for Medicare reimbursement may limit the number of dollars that are left for delivering services via remote monitoring. This kind of uncertainty about reimbursement may be problematic for some developers of home care telemedicine systems.
Meanwhile, passage of the legislation demonstrates Congressional support for Medicare reimbursement of telemedicine, according to the American Telemedicine Association (ATA; Washington DC). Two significant improvements will:
- Eliminate current fee-splitting requirements at patient and referring sites
- Expand eligible service areas, including all non-metropolitan counties and existing urban Medicare demonstration sites.
Discussions of this legislation and other recent changes in Medicare reimbursement policies appear in the October, November, and December 2000 newsletters from Feedback Research Services. These have been added to Home Health Briefing, a report published in early October 2000 that analyzes market trends and revenues for home monitoring and telemedicine systems. Clinical and operational perspectives are also included, based on interviews with home health agency personnel and telemedicine program administrators. For more information about this report, contact us at 541-899-8088 or info@feed-back.com.
The Web address for the ATA is: www.americantelemed.org.
