Breaking Down the Barriers to Telehealth: CMS’s Latest Rural Health Strategy

CMS unveils new rural healthcare strategy via telehealth.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) wants to reduce hospital readmissions and unnecessary ER visits with its newly unveiled Rural Health Strategy.

Currently, there are significant barriers to accessing telehealth. While physicians and providers have to answer to their respective healthcare boards within the states in which they are licensed, if you provide telemedicine, you are held accountable and ordered to follow the federal rules and regulations (of which there are many!) – and the rules and regulations of every state in which you provide services. For example, say Dr. Hyde resides in New York and provides medication management via telehealth. Patient Jekyll resides in New Jersey. Dr. Hyde must comply with all rules and regulations of the federal government, New York, and New Jersey.

Currently, 48 state medical boards, plus those of Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, require that physicians engaging in telemedicine be licensed in the state in which a patient resides. Fifteen state boards issue a special purpose license, telemedicine license or certificate, or license to practice medicine across state lines to allow for the practice of telemedicine. There are 18 States that only allow Medicaid recipients to receive telemedicine services. One state requires only private insurance companies to reimburse for services provided through telemedicine. Twenty-eight states, plus D.C., require both private insurance companies and Medicaid to cover telemedicine services to the same extent as face-to-face consultations.

As you can see, telehealth can leave hospitals and providers wondering whether they took a left at Albuquerque.

Getting paid for telemedicine has been an issue for many hospitals and medical providers – not only in rural areas, but in all areas. However, according to CMS, rural hospitals and providers feel the pain more acutely. We certainly hope that the progress CMS initially achieves with rural providers and telehealth will percolate into cities and across the nation.

The absolute top barrier to providing and getting reimbursed for telehealth is the cross-state licensure issue, and according to CMS’s Rural Health Strategy, the agency is seeking to reduce the administrative and financial burdens.

Through interviews with providers and hospitals across the country and many informal forums, CMS has pinpointed eight methods to increase the use of telehealth:

1. Improving reimbursement
2. Adapting and improving quality measures and reporting
3. Improving access to services and providers
4. Improving service delivery and payment models
5. Engaging consumers
6. Recruiting, training, and retaining the workforce
7. Leveraging partnerships/resources
8. Improving affordability and accessibility of insurance options

What this new Rural Health Strategy tells me, as a healthcare attorney and avid “keeper of the watchtower” germane to all things Medicare and Medicaid, is that the current barriers to telehealth may come tumbling down. Obviously, CMS does not have the legal authority to change the Code of Federal Regulations, which now requires that telehealth physicians be licensed in the state in which a patient resides, but CMS has enough clout, when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid, to make Congress listen.

My crystal ball prediction? Easier and more telehealth is in everyone’s future.

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