Telehealth in the Hospital Setting – Including Critical Access Hospitals

Before Richelle Marting, attorney and registered health information administrator, dove into her latest webinar presentation as part of HTRC’s Education Series, she shared a reminder of just how much telehealth use has changed in the past year and a half.

Marting came across a piece of data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently. It stated that prior to the COVID-19 Emergency, “only 14,000 Medicare beneficiaries received telehealth services per week.” Flash forward to the time period between March and July in 2020 and the number was over 10 million.

“We hear, we know and we see how much telehealth has grown in the last year and a half since the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency was declared, but this to me really drove home to what extent,” Marting said.

For the remainder of the session, Marting discussed some of the major COVID-19 telehealth flexibilities IPPS and critical access hospitals have. As she reviewed some of these key changes, her earlier message rang true: more people are using telehealth, and the flexibilities that hospitals have add to increased telehealth service accessibility…