ATA Asks the Biden Administration For Assurances on Telehealth Coverage

Worried that Congress is too busy to take on long-term telehealth policy, telehealth advocates are calling on the Biden Administration to ensure that emergency measures enacted to expand access and coverage of connected health services stay in place through next year.

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the American Telemedicine Association has asked that the government indicate how long the public health emergency will remain in place, and that the telehealth freedoms now permitted under the PHE be assured until at least the end of 2022.

Those assurances, the ATA says, are important to healthcare organizations and patients who are now relying on telehealth services to access needed care.

“While Congress acted quickly in 2020 to give HHS the necessary statutory flexibilities to expand access to telehealth, many of these flexibilities are limited to the duration of the COVID-19 PHE,” the letter, signed by ATA CEO Ann Mond Johnson states. “Without action from Congress, Medicare beneficiaries will abruptly lose access to nearly all recently expanded coverage of telehealth when the COVID-19 PHE ends. This would have a devastating effect on access to care across the entire US healthcare system. As such, the ATA is working diligently with Congress to guarantee you and your team have the appropriate and necessary authorities to ensure patient care is not disrupted when the PHE ends.”

The nation saw a surge in telehealth use during the pandemic, much of that tied to emergency measures enacted at the federal and state levels to expand coverage and access at a time when in-person services were being curtailed. Several states have allowed their emergency measures to lapse, while others have either extended those measures to follow national guidelines or amended their telehealth regulations to make some of those measures permanent.

The uncertainty around long-term telehealth policy, however, is forcing many healthcare organizations to hold back on expanding telehealth services, or even to plan on ending them once the PHE ends. And while there are dozens of bills before Congress seeking to expand telehealth coverage beyond the PHE, there’s no guarantee that any will be addressed.

Mond noted in the letter that the ATA has praised the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for its plans for telehealth and remote patient monitoring coverage in the proposed 2022 Physician Fee Schedule. CMS has proposed to keep its extended telehealth coverage – called Category 3 telehealth services – in place until at least the end of 2023, regardless of the status of the PHE.

“This sensible action will help ensure patients have a glidepath to post-pandemic care and helps address the looming telehealth cliff,” she wrote. “By giving providers and patients the certainty that these services will remain available through 2023, CMS is using sound judgement to offer predictability to millions of Americans who are concerned about care options.”

“While this action is an important step in the right direction, the availability of Category 3 services will not benefit as many patients as it could if the PHE declaration ends prematurely,” she added. “We believe this CMS action sets an HHS precedent for recognizing the need for temporary flexibilities to remain through 2023 and that you should apply the same logic to the PHE by offering assurances that the declaration will likely continue through at least 2022.”

“As the nation grapples with the uncertainty of the continued COVID-19 crisis, we request that you offer some sense of predictability so that patients can be assured their access to lifesaving, quality healthcare services will not go away in the imminent future,” Mond concluded.