CARES Act Expands Telehealth Coverage for Medicare, FQHCs and the VA

Telehealth Support — Greater need for telehealth operations to provide advice, diagnoses, and ways to provide care outside of a doctor’s office.

The rapid and deadly spread of COVID through nursing homes will increase demand for home-based care as patients and families avoid shared spaces and stricter regulations drive up costs. Pre-COVID, the primary telehealth use case was for more convenient urgent care. Now that so many patients are comfortable with telehealth, there is the potential to... See more

Telehealth, in particular, can lower costs and broaden access to care. In the last decade, companies like Livongo (chronic disease management) and PillPack (an online pharmacy) emerged to help seniors better access healthcare.

One interesting change to watch is the expansion of the types of drugs that can be prescribed via a telemedicine-only visit. You can even get controlled substances like opioids via telemedicine now (don’t get any ideas). I wonder if we’ll look back on this and discover we don’t really need face-to-face visits for most prescriptions, or if we’ll rea... See more

Quite clearly, inexpensive healthcare technology platforms such as telehealth, remote monitoring, and contact tracing will be an essential cornerstone of managing nursing homes going forward.

While it remains to be seen what the telemedicine regulatory landscape will look like post-pandemic, telemedicine visits as a fraction of total doctor visits spiked in Q2 2020, and remain at an elevated level from the start of the year.