A nationwide dropoff in telemedicine visits is forcing providers who raced to ramp up virtual care in the face of the pandemic to quickly recalibrate their offerings as more patients turn back to in-person appointments.
Telehealth is a bit of American ingenuity that seems to have paid off in the coronavirus pandemic. Medicare temporarily waived restrictions predating the smartphone era and now there’s a push to make telemedicine widely available in the future.
Telemedicine is not a new concept. In fact, Medicare has been offering telehealth services to enrollees for years, largely in an effort to cater to a population of older Americans in which mobility issues are prevalent.
Legal mandates for Idaho insurers to cover telehealth services at the same rate as in-person visits likely aren’t the best route for ensuring that telehealth payment parity remains, a state group of health care experts learned this week.
Dr. John Scott from UW Medicine says there’s been an unlikely silver lining from the coronavirus – the rise of telemedicine. “It's like 20 years worth of work in two months,” he said. Scott says the pandemic caused normally strict state laws to be relaxed, making access to care easier. “Just to give you some numbers, so we got a pretty well-established telemedicine program and we did 20,000 visits in 2019,” he said. “In February, we did around 250 visits. By April we were over 30,000”.