mHealth

Janet Major, Associate Director for Innovation and Digital Health at the Arizona Telemedicine Program, based at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson, was recently honored as an American Telemedicine Association Fellow during the American Telemedicine Association annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas on Sunday, March 5, 2023.

Each year the Association recognizes members of distinction as new Fellows. Election to the American Telemedicine Association College of Fellows recognizes significant achievements in telemedicine, service to the general telemedicine community, and service to the Association. Joining Major in this year’s class of Fellows are William "Bill" Paschall, Senior Vice President with Clear Arch Health, and Teresa Rincon, Senior Telehealth Consultant with Blue Cirrus Consulting and Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Graduate School of Nursing.

The Southwest Telehealth Resource Center recently connected with Stetson Berg, chair of the New Mexico Telehealth Alliance, to ask about his organization’s priorities for 2023, and the future of telemedicine in New Mexico. Berg became active with the New Mexico Telehealth Alliance in 2019 when he became administrator of telemedicine for the University of New Mexico. In spring 2022, he became chair. The organization’s mission the past 20 years has focused on policy, creating and moving bills through the state legislature that helped ensure that telemedicine could be delivered in New Mexico from patient visit to remote monitoring. “Even phone calls are considered included under our bill that was passed back in 2019, even before the pandemic, and the first version of that was passed in 2013,” Berg said. “There's been a long history of advocacy with the New Mexico Telehealth Alliance.”

The remarkable lifelong health benefits of breastfeeding for both a breastfeeding parent and their child are well-known, and include a reduced risk of obesity, diabetes, breast cancer, early childhood illnesses and autoimmune diseases, to name just a few. Most new parents intend to breastfeed their child, and 83.2% of newborns in the US start out receiving some breastmilk initially, but according to the CDC’s 2022 Breastfeeding Report Card, only 24.9% of infants in the United States are exclusively breastfed at 6 months of age as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

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.

It’s the start of Telehealth Awareness Week, and Ann Mond Johnson, American Telemedicine Association CEO, is beaming as she reflects on the growth of this second annual event.

“The number of endorsing partners for this second Telehealth Awareness Week has doubled (since the first),” Mond Johnson says, adding that the first had 25 endorsing partners, and this year’s has grown to 50, including organizations like Easter Seals, and the Association of American Medical Colleges. “To us, this means the messages that telehealth is important, needed, and accepted are being heard.”

For decades, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), only permitted telehealth in particular geographic settings with numerous restrictions surrounding originating sites, providers, services, modality, and access options. However, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a Public Health Emergency (PHE) that relaxed these restrictions and opened the doors to the use of telehealth in the home, among other measures, which have contributed to Medicare beneficiaries utilizing telehealth in droves with an increase from 840,000 in 2019 to 52.7 million in 2020.