ATA: What's ahead for telehealth policy after the pandemic

The American Telehealth Association is working with Congress and several federal agencies to shape the fate of policies and payments for telehealth services that experienced a rapid uptake during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that President Joe Biden has declared the COVID-19 pandemic over, the ATA's Telehealth Awareness Week policy update webinar explored how federal and state telehealth policies may be affected as Congress decides whether or not to end the public health emergency (PHE). "As we know, [President] Biden has said in recent days that the pandemic is over, so it's possible that the technical public health emergency might expire sometime in the very near future," said Megan Herber, director at Faegre Drinker who advises ATA and ATA Action on all things Federal policy. Telehealth payments and provider practices are highly regulated on the Federal level, said Quinn Shean, strategic advisor at Tusk Ventures and the state policy advisor for ATA and ATA Action. In terms of state-level telehealth policy, there are multiple state priorities because states differ in their approaches to telehealth coverage requirements for public and private health plans, reimbursement for services provided via telehealth, and eligibility to deliver reimbursable services. There have been hundreds of pieces of legislation to update state telehealth policies. Many of the barriers to telehealth policy have been based on perceptions that telehealth is somehow substandard and that romanticizes in-patient care, but telehealth has often delivered care where there was no prior access to healthcare, said Shean.