Telehealth is the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to support long-distance clinical health care, patient and professional health-related education, public health and health administration
As telemedicine teeters on the edge of an explosive state of expansion, so many questions come to mind, including how it will transform healthcare delivery as we know it. With value-based reimbursement and a push to serve the underserved growing in the U.S, telemedicine stands to gain a lot of traction and quickly. Still, it’s important to remember the flesh and blood human elements driving this transitive development of reform.
A federal bankruptcy court in Columbus, Ohio, has approved a plan for failed telemedicine vendor HealthSpot to sell off its assets. Dublin, Ohio-based Healthspot chose to liquidate under Chapter 7 of bankruptcy law rather than reorganize under Chapter 11.
The ATA is lobbying CMS and Congress to remove Medicare restrictions on telehealth coverage. The new Telehealth Services Workgroup, sponsored by the American Medical Association, has already begun to facilitate proposals that would expand Current Procedural Terminology’s telehealth codes to include emerging services.
The Creating Opportunities Now for Necessary and Effective Care Technologies (CONNECT) for Health Act, proposed February 3 by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), has strong bipartisan support and would expand Medicare telehealth services, improve care outcomes and help cut costs for patients and providers. Other bill sponsors include Senators Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), John Thune (R-SD), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.),
A new study suggests that telemedicine-based management for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is as effective and may be comparable to in-person care.
Results show that there was no significant difference in functional outcome changes, dropout rates, or objectively measured positive airway pressure (PAP) adherence between patients having an in-person physician visit or a clinical video telehealth (CVT) based visit at their initial evaluation. Participants reported high satisfaction with the telemedicine pathway, with all of them agreeing that the quality and content of their telemedicine visits were comparable to in-person visits. The most frequently mentioned advantages of telemedicine were decreased travel burden and greater convenience.
Maybe you wake up on a Saturday with a cough or pink eye.
Wouldn’t it be great to pull out your smartphone, see a physician online and get a prescription sent straight to your pharmacy?
It could become reality under a bill lawmakers are considering in the final weeks of the legislative session. It is already happening on a small scale for some Hoosiers, but it might not be legal.
Telemedicine – or telehealth – is not new in Indiana. It helps provide access to health care for Hoosiers in rural areas, or for anyone at times when traditional doctors aren’t available.
Writing for healthcareinfosecurity.com, former Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights (OCR) attorney, David Holtzman predicts that in 2016, the OCR will aggressively increase their number of audits to enforce compliance among health care providers and their business associates, with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) patient privacy and security law.
Jonathan Woodson, MD, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs issued a memorandum on February 3rd that allows for the Military Health System to treat patients in their homes or “other patient locations as deemed appropriate by the treating provider.”
Though some prisons used telemedicine as early as the 1980s, its use has dramatically increased with the arrival of vastly improved technology, electronic medical records, and pressure to control ever rising medical costs.
The increasing cost of healthcare and widening gap in coverage has caused lawmakers and health service providers to explore cost-effective strategies for service delivery.