Telehealth has received a boost from the federal government, but more may be needed. I’m Jeff Lagasse with Healthcare Finance News, and we explore that and other topics in this week’s Top Stories.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has added more than 60 services to the Medicare telehealth list that will continue to be covered beyond the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Healthcare Finance News, (https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/congressional-action-needed-telehealth-not-return-rural-benefit-cms-administrator-seema-verma) the agency is also making permanent nine of the 144 telehealth services that are now covered by Medicare. Another 59 services will be extended temporarily. What this means is that when the public health crisis ends, services including group psychotherapy, cognitive assessment and certain home visits will continue to be covered by Medicare. However, legislation is needed to prevent telehealth from reverting to a rural benefit, and CMS is reviewing what additional services should be made permanent.
This received a response from the American Telemedicine Association, which commended CMS’ moves to expand some services but said that progress is still necessary when it comes to remote monitoring services. In HealthcareITNews, (https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ata-responds-cms-final-rule-making-some-telehealth-coverage-permanent) we see that ATA CEO Ann Mond Johnson expressed regret that CMS did not heed concerns expressed by the medical community and outlined in comments on the draft rule submitted in September. The ATA has drawn attention to the Telehealth Modernization Act and Protecting Access to Post-COVID-19 Telehealth Act of 2020 as vital steps for safeguarding access to virtual care.
Lastly this week, Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind has designed an artificial intelligence system that has cracked the longstanding challenge of folding protein, which creates the possibility of new treatments for diseases. MobiHealthNews reports (https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/deepmind-ais-protein-folding-prediction-achieves-unprecedented-accuracy-opening-doors-new) that DeepMind’s AI system AlphaFold has been named the winner of the biannual CASP competition, which reviews contestants’ ability to blindly predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence. Despite patient data privacy concerns, DeepMind was rolled into Google Health just over a year ago.
I’m Jeff Lagasse with Healthcare Finance News, and this has been Top Stories.