16 September, 2024 18:32

The American Telemedicine Association is celebrating the week of September 16th as “Telehealth Awareness Week.” NARHC is pleased to add its voice to the important discussion about how telehealth is used by the over 5,500 Rural Health Clinics nationwide and raise awareness about ways to improve it for our safety net providers.

Telehealth has rapidly become a major part of healthcare delivery, with survey results showing that over 70 percent of RHCs provide some telehealth services. Further, 63 percent of RHCs described telemedicine as “complimentary” to their in-person services. Yet, many RHCs have cited concerns about reimbursement rates, staffing shortages, and connectivity issues as limiting factors in their use of this technology. As such, NARHC would like to use this week to highlight for policymakers not only how telehealth has improved care in rural communities, but also how it can be made better to ensure rural providers can continue offering these services going forward.

Current State of Telehealth for RHCs

Congress must act by the end of the year to extend Medicare medical telehealth flexibilities for all providers, including RHCs. The consensus among policymakers appears to be an agreement to pass a two-year extension—which on paper looks much less costly than passing permanent policy—at which point they would likely extend flexibilities again. Unfortunately, since the initial telehealth expansion, RHCs have been repeatedly left behind due to the “special payment rule” which pays providers significantly less for medical telehealth appointments than what they would receive for an in-person visit. While fee-for-service providers receive reimbursement parity, RHCs have the least incentive to invest in, and utilize, this expensive technology.

Fortunately, four bills have been introduced this Congress to address this issue and would establish reimbursement parity, along with normal billing and coding, for RHC medical telehealth services. NARHC’s team in Washington, D.C. has been meeting consistently with House and Senate offices to build support for these bills and push for this fix to be included as part of an extension package later this year. Critically, the House Ways & Means (W&M) Committee and the House Energy & Commerce (E&C) Health Subcommittee have advanced competing telehealth bills—the E&C version does include reimbursement parity, but the W&M bill does not. In the weeks and months ahead, it is vitally important that members of the House understand the drastic differences between the two bills and that we continue building momentum for legislation that does address this issue for RHCs.

How to Get Involved

To help ensure this issue gets in front of as many policymakers as possible, NARHC has launched a tool that allows you to send a message directly to your members of Congress and encourage them to support telehealth reimbursement parity in this next extension. The best way to get a Senator or Representative’s support for an issue is for them to hear from constituents how they’re impacted by the policy. This tool allows you to customize and add to a pre-written message explaining the RHC telehealth situation, and we encourage you to include information about how your clinic utilizes telemedicine and what access to this technology means to your patients.

For Telehealth Awareness Week, please consider taking a few minutes to fill this out and send it to your members of Congress. Doing so could be the impetus for them to cosponsor legislation that addresses this for the over 5,500 RHCs nationwide. You can access the tool, and explore other RHC-related messages, here.

If you have any questions, please contact Sarah Hohman at Sarah.Hohman@narhc.org.