Southwest Telehealth Resource Center Blog

Early in the Covid lockdown in Las Vegas, Dr. Luis H. Medina-Garcia was front and center of almost every press conference and community conversation.

The public health emergency (PHE) put the infectious diseases specialist at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada in the middle of Clark County’s planning and communication efforts and forced him and his colleagues to finally take that deep dive into an area of practice they had eagerly discussed many years prior to the pandemic–telemedicine.

Five Key Telehealth Takeaways from the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023  

On Thursday, December 29, President Biden signed into law H.R. 2716, the Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA) for Fiscal Year 2023. This legislation provides more than $1.7 trillion to fund various aspects of the federal government, including a 2-year extension of the major telehealth waivers that were initiated during the federal public health emergency (PHE). 

The full text of the legislation, which comes in at 4,155 pages, is available here. The most pertinent section of the new law that relates to telehealth is under:

Carol Yarbrough recognizes that compliance can be a scary avenue for many in the healthcare industry.

“When I was a compliance officer type person, people would avoid me on the street … they don't do that anymore,” Yarbrough joked during a recent webinar discussion on billing practices for hospital and clinic professionals.

Yarbrough, a specialist in federal and state regulatory billing and reimbursement guidelines, recently led the virtual webinar for the Southwest Telehealth Resource Center.

The group chose to focus initially on video visits for those in need of mental health care.  We succeeded in step one: we surveyed 16 mental health provider organizations to find out what data they were collecting, and how success was being measured in 2020.  The organizations ranged from large university medical centers to private practices in nine states.  Not surprisingly, the data and metrics varied widely, even across large university-based systems.

In the early days of the Covid pandemic, Dianne Connery realized something needed to be done for people in her rural Texas community to help connect folks to their medical appointments.

Connery, director of the Pottsboro Area Library in Pottsboro, Texas, said it started when one woman with pulmonary disease came to the library for help, desperate to meet with her doctor but too high risk to come to his office—a two-hour drive south to Dallas.