During the pandemic, Medicare has been paying for healthcare delivered virtually for a broader swath of patients, but the waivers expire at the end of the year. Yet there’s a strong bipartisan push in Congress to make the shift toward telehealth permanent.
A new bill in Washington would permanently expand telehealth services under Medicare and allow patients in rural areas without access to broadband to use audio services, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said. “It should not have taken a pandemic for Medicare to finally unlock the potential of telehealth services — and now we need to make sure that these vital telehealth services continue to be available to patients long after the COVID-19 pandemic is over," Shaheen said in a statement.
Amazon has signed up multiple companies to its telehealth service, called Amazon Care, a company executive said Wednesday. Amazon Care provides virtual and in-home health services to some Amazon employees. The company announced in March that it would open up Amazon Care to other companies later this year.
Perhaps during the pandemic you had a chat with your doctor about an ongoing condition or a new symptom that showed up. Your questions were answered, and maybe you got a prescription without stepping foot in a physician’s office. Those are the so-called telehealth doctor’s visits---new and not-so-new ways of getting health care. “Telehealth started in rural areas and has evolved,” says Melissa O’Connor, a gerontologist and associate professor at Villanova who is an expert on the topic. “During the pandemic, it really exploded.” But the word has been “misused,” she told me.
I hope I can say without much critique that today's IT professionals have generally had an easier time getting over the consequences of the pandemic — save maybe for the higher workloads and, of course, higher stress levels. Layoffs and furloughs have been commonplace, don't get me wrong, but the demand for core IT professionals hasn't changed.