Executive summary The American federal government has declared its decision to promote and incorporate telehealth services into healthcare coverage for its citizens. Obamacare adopted this practice only federally, via Medicare, and that too in specific situations. The authority of deciding telehealth services to be provided under Medicaid chiefly continue to be under state government jurisdiction. Major barriers challenge telehealth acceptance and adoption, with the overall country and individual states unable to fully appreciate telehealth’s cost-effectiveness. The proposed Telehealth Parity Act (TPA) will revolutionize Medicare telehealth reimbursement, besides expanding Medicare recipients’ coverage. States will perhaps slowly do away with their respective parity-related regulatory restrictions which constrain professionals and organizations, shifting their emphasis to telehealth integration into routine healthcare coverage.

Introduction

Telehealth tools will aid practitioners in providing superior-quality, economical healthcare, which is crucial to the growing value-based imbursement trend. All things considered, telehealth boasts significant advantages if the healthcare system expends more efforts that can potentially deal with or alleviate associated problems and risks. At present, state and federal statutes and rules impact telehealth within the nation. The absence of a consistent legal telehealth strategy remains a key issue. Specifically, concerns revolving around reimbursements in case of public initiatives (e.g., Medicaid) as well as private insurance firms constrain telehealth adoption. Poor or no reimbursement to particular telehealth services in comparison to direct services lowers incentives to offering telehealth services (“Health Policy Brief”...

In this paper, approaches to realize a health sector-initiated state telehealth policy will be discussed.
Approaches and results

The proposed TPA will revolutionize Medicare telehealth reimbursement, besides expanding Medicare recipients’ coverage. Eligible geographic locations will also increase. For deriving associated benefits, states will probably take a step towards telehealth-related total parity statutes. In the absence of parity, not much incentive remains to provide telehealth services or develop the telehealth arena further (Weinstein et al., 2014). The absence of such incentive will cause practitioners to continue relying on direct care, leading to the continuance of steep healthcare expenses, continued problems of accessibility and potential decreased chronic care standards (in case of patients benefiting from remote observation services).

Moreover, states will probably slowly do away with their respective parity-related regulatory restrictions which constrain professionals and organizations, shifting their emphasis to telehealth integration into routine healthcare coverage. Reimbursement will perhaps ultimately include remote observation and store-and-forward practice, as well as portable tools and smartphone apps (Neufeld, Doarn & Aly, 2016).

States continue to maintain considerable power when it comes to the telehealth services Medicaid covers and reimburses. A majority of them fail to reimburse telehealth-connected electronic mail, fax or telephone communications. A scant four states permit physician telehealth reimbursement and nineteen states have limited type of provider to only nine. Washington D.C. and 15 other states have no provider type-based reimbursement limitation. However, most states don’t…