One More Time: Telehealth's Top 5 Stories of 2022

We're taking one final look at HealthLeaders' most-popular Telehealth stories over the past 12 months.

New Study Finds Telehealth Outperforms In-Person Care in HEDIS Measures

New research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds that telehealth was superior to in-person care in 11 of 16 quality performance measures for primary care.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Robert Graham Center in Washington DC and Pennsylvania-based Wellspan Health, focused on more than 526,000 patients receiving healthcare services at roughly 200 Wellspan Health outpatient sites between March 1, 2020, and November 30, 2021, and used HEDIS (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) measurements.

UnitedHealthcare Sees 2.5K% Increase in Telehealth Usage

UnitedHealthcare Inc. members logged more than 28 million virtual care visits in 2021, a 2,500% increase over pre-pandemic usage, the payer says.

"While the COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented spike in the number of virtual care visits, we are seeing that telehealth has staying power even as many people have returned to in-person appointments," UnitedHealthcare CMO Donna O'Shea, MD, tells HealthLeaders.

"Virtual care visits in 2021 by UnitedHealthcare members approximately matched the total for 2020, with continued significant use of telehealth so far in 2022."    

OIG Audit Backs Medicare Telehealth Integrity

First the good news.

Only 1,714 of the 742,000 providers who billed Medicare and Medicare Advantage for telehealth services for about 28 million beneficiaries during the first year of the pandemic "posed a high risk" to the program integrity, a federal audit shows.

Now the not-so-good news.

These high-risk providers represent only 0.2% of the audit sample, but they billed for about 500,000 beneficiaries and collected $127.7 million in Medicare fee-for-service payments for care provided between March 2020 and February 2021, according to an audit by the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General.

House OKs Extension of Medicare Telehealth Flexibilities Through 2024

Congress is halfway toward extending telehealth flexibilities enacted during the pandemic until the end of 2024.

The US House of Representatives this week passed the Advancing Telehealth Beyond COVID-19 Act of 2021 (HR 4040) by a 416-12 vote, sending the issue on to the Senate. The bill, introduced more than a year ago by US Rep Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), expands the definition of "originating site" to allow more locations to use telehealth, eliminates facility fees for new sites, expands the list of healthcare providers able to use telehealth, adds audio-only telehealth to the definition of "telecommunications system," and makes permanent the ability of federally-qualified health centers (FHQCs) and rural health clinics (RHCs) to use telehealth under the Medicare program.

Vermont Amends Assisted Suicide Law to Include Telemedicine

Vermont’s governor has signed into law a bill amending the state’s assisted suicide statute to include telemedicine.

S.74, passed by the state House and Senate after an almost two-year process and signed by Gov. Phil Scott on April 27, amends the state’s medical aid in dying law, which was passed in 2013, allows a patient who meets specific criteria to request a prescription to aid in dying through telemedicine, eliminating the need for two in-person consults and a 48-hour waiting period. The bill also establishes legal immunity for licensed healthcare providers, including pharmacists.

The bill defines telemedicine for these purposes as an interactive audio-video platform that complies with the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).