Tennessee Lawmakers Pass New Telehealth Coverage Law - With Limits

Tennessee lawmakers have passed legislation that expands coverage for telehealth services.

HB 8002, passed during a special session of the state Legislature this week, requires payers to cover telehealth services as they would cover in-person care. It also requires payers to cover remote patient monitoring services if that service is covered by Medicare, with payer and provider negotiating the amount of reimbursement.

It also relaxes the definition of an originating site for telehealth delivery, by characterizing it as “the location where a patient is located for telehealth services and that originates telehealth service to another qualified site, such as the office of a healthcare services provider, a hospital, a rural health clinic, or any other location deemed acceptable by the health insurance entity.”

The new law mandates reimbursement parity for telehealth services up until April of 2022. It also allows licensed alcohol and drug abuse counselors and veterinarians to use telehealth to meet patient-provider relationship and standard of care guidelines – also up until April 2022.

Lawmakers passed the bill during a special session this week ordered by Governor Bill Lee, who wanted the Legislature to conclude business that had been interrupted in June, when the coronavirus pandemic shut things down. At that time, lawmakers were debating a telehealth bill that would have expanded coverage without any deadline.

One payer in the state has already taken that step.

Three months ago BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, which covers roughly 70 percent of the state’s residents, announced that it was making “telephone and video visits” with in-network providers permanent. This followed a one-month period from March to April that saw the insurer process 18 times more telehealth claims than usual.