by
Loren Bonner, DOTmed News Online Editor | September 25, 2012
From the September 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Reimbursement issues loom for telemedicine
Provider training, patient monitoring, and medical data transfer are just some of the ways telemedicine improves health care in underserved areas.
While there’s an interest in expanding telehealth, Morgan says barriers still remain in the form of licensure and reimbursement.
“Those barriers are still there, despite the ACA. The components of the ACA have to have telemedicine to work. But those barriers in a lot of states are still going to keep telemedicine out of the mainstream. It’s a huge policy issue we are still concerned with,” he says.
Critical components of telehealth include digital data and electronic health records.
In 2009, the Health Resources and Services Administration led a federal rural HIT task force and identified access to capital as a key challenge for rural hospitals who wanted to purchase EHRs and other health IT. In addition to the funding incentives from the Affordable Care Act (built on investments from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) that allow hospitals to use EHRs and attain meaningful use, HRSA sponsored a series of workshops and national conference calls that specifically link rural hospitals with loan programs for the purchase of HIT hardware and software.
Despite what the federal government is trying to do, as it stands today, rural health care is on the endangered species list. For the health care professionals at these hospitals and the communities they serve, the benefit is clear. Now it’s just a matter of seeing if elected officials are on the same page.
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