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 Today in Health it, the story is DC is a wash and new and reintroduce Telehealth bills. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. I. And engaged, no sponsor for today, but I wanted to make you aware of some things that are going on.

We are introducing written content onto our website this month, and we are really excited about it. We continue to adapt based on our discussions with our community. And some of you don't have the time to listen to 60 minute podcasts, but you do have the time to skimm an article. So we are going to provide you articles, two kinds of first digest of our interviews on the influence shows.

And feature stories. We've hired two fantastic feature writers and we will be producing a couple of features every month. Look for these changes on March 18th, on this week, health.com, amongst several other updates. I'll fill you in on those later. All right. Here's today's story. The telehealth bills are starting to pile up on Capitol Hill.

This story comes from, let's see where it comes from, m health intelligence.com. So at least three more bills have been filed over the past two weeks, each seeking to expand connected health. Access and coverage, either during or beyond the Coronavirus pandemic, the advancing connectivity during the coronavirus to ensure support for seniors.

they're, they're, they search for an acronym. It sort of cracks me up. The acronym for this is the Access Act. I guess when you get that. Acronym Right. It has more of a, a success factor built into it, filed in the House of reps by it looks like bipartisan in the Senate by senators, uh, Amy Klobuchar and Bob Casey.

Both Democrats targets telehealth expansion in nursing facilities, which have been hit hard by c Ovid 19. All right. The bill would set aside $50 million for the Health and Human Services department's, telehealth resource center to expand Medicaid and Medicare coverage of telehealth services in nursing facilities.

It would also create a grant program for nursing homes to create virtual visit services. During the pandemic and require the HHS secretary to provide guidance on virtual care expansion from the start of the pandemic. The physical distancing necessary for saving lives has made it almost impossible for nursing home residents to receive telehealth services or visit with their loved ones.

We are introducing the Bipartisan Access Act to ensure that all nursing home residents are able to use telehealth services and to. Communicate through video with their families and loved ones. That's interesting. All right, so, you know, necessary we've, we have people in these nursing homes and they need access to care and access to their loved ones during this pandemic.

The test would be conducted at home with telehealth consult, and would either confirm, confirm, or discount a diagnosis of covid 19 or similar respiratory infection. The Coronavirus pandemic has brought on unprecedented challenges. For all Americans, particularly the vulnerable senior populations who are most at risk of contracting covid 19 and have continued to stay isolated from family and friends.

Said one of the representatives who recently joined his colleagues in the Senate telehealth caucus to re. Introduce the protecting access to post c Ovid 19 Telehealth Act. And in the press release, one area we have seen incredibly positive changes has been for seniors utilizing telehealth in at-Home Care.

I. As well as at-home care tools with growing appreciation for the flexibility and comfort this care can provide. I'm proud to re-introduce this legislation to continue the much needed. So everybody's taking their turns saying, Hey, we're gonna get something funded around this. So this, this one's, uh, at-home tests.

Which is, uh, interesting as well. The bill was introduced last year, like so many others died. In committee Spec specifies that Medicare will reimburse providers for either ordering a test to an eligible telehealth individual, an amount equal to an amount that such physician or practitioner. Would have been paid for a diagnostic laboratory test or furnishing an assisted telehealth consultation to an eligible telehealth individual.

An amount equal to the amount that the physician or practitioner would have been paid for such telehealth services. And I know it sounds like I'm making mistakes as I'm reading this. This is how they write these things. They, it is just hard to read, quite frankly. But essentially what we're saying is we're going to support

at-home testing with telehealth visits. Got it. So finally there's the insuring Telehealth Expansion Act. Oh my gosh. It doesn't have an acronym. We almost don't need to talk about this one. It doesn't have an acronym. Gosh. Anyway, it's the insuring Telehealth Expansion Act or ET tia. Well, it doesn't work, which was rein reintroduced by re a couple representatives after failing to make it through last year's legislative session.

A temporary waiver of requirement for face-to-face visits between home dialysis patients and physicians. Use of telehealth to conduct face-to-face encounter prior to re recertification of eligibility for hospice care during the emergency period, and encourage the use of telecommunication systems for home health services furnished during the emergency period.

Uh, it would also require that the government accountability office, the GAO to report back to Congress three years after the Bill's passage, and again, at five years after passage on success and challenges associated with the expansion of connected health, particularly in rural areas. Alright, so that's the story.

It really covers three bills that are going through. . As you know, at the end of each one of these, I try to do a so what? But I think you know what the so what is for a health system in this? This is the funding source for future telehealth work. Don't assume this is gonna come out exactly the way you would like.

If you have advocacy arms in DC put them to work. This is where I really miss, we used to have. Consultants come in on a quarterly basis and talk to us as executives of the health system and help us understand the regulatory framework, what was coming down. We also had an advocacy team. They, they told us what were the hot topics that were going on in our states that we operated in, as well as what was going on in DC around these.

If you don't have a a, an advocacy arm, you can utilize chime himss, the American Hospital Association, and others who are already on the hill. I would say figure out what you need. And I think that depends on the market you serve. As an example, you know, you have some of the things they talked about in rural, so I, I'll use rural as an example.

You know, . Asynchronous telehealth or phone as most people would refer to it. So phone telehealth is critical in those areas. Not everybody has broadband. Not everybody has access to the technology that you would have in maybe a, uh, a more metropolitan area. Therefore the phone delivering health across the phone is critical.

So that's one of the things you're gonna wanna make sure it gets extended and funded. Uh, protections against big players swooping in with their telehealth solutions and undercutting your, your funding source would be nice, right? Because telehealth becomes an interesting. Way to move into some markets and to capture some things.

And you don't wanna put smaller rural health systems at risk. And one of the ways you do that is you put up some protections to make sure that they, they don't get, um, I don't know, get steamrolled in the process. I, I would say another thing for rural would be subsidies for remote consults to larger academic medical centers.

That, that might be interesting. I don't know. Uh, because remote consults is a form of telehealth, right? We've talked about this a lot. Three things. When people say telehealth, I think of three things. Remote consults, remote visits, and remote patient monitoring. Those are the three things I think of. I'm sure there's other nuance to it, but those are the three primary areas.

So when someone says to me, you know, the, the, the definition of telehealth is really fuzzy. Well, it, it is and it isn't. It's really, it really stems around those three things. The final thing here, I think if I were in the rural area, is we, we need funds for rural broadband. It's just necessary. We have this digital divide that has been created across the country.

I think this is gonna be solved. I think there's some people working on it, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. So they obviously see an opportunity, but let's get broadband to every part of the country because it's not only a part of healthcare, it's a part of really operating in today's society.

Hopefully you're, you're getting the picture of what I'm trying to do here. Craft the perfect bill for the community that you serve, and make sure your voice is heard on the Capitol. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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