mHealth

From Dr. Steven Hansen’s Arizona Humane Society office, you may have heard a sigh of relief when Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed Senate Bill 1053 into law on May 9. Beginning in August, veterinarians licensed in the state will legally be able to provide veterinary care through telemedicine, a care alternative many have become accustomed to on the human side of healthcare.

Currently, there’s a six-week waiting list for pet owners who need the Humane Society’s subsidized services at their clinics in Maricopa County. Bringing telemedicine into the picture will make a difference.

It’s tough to believe that almost 10 years ago, we began to realize a substantial cure for hepatitis C was just around the corner. When the ION-3 study results came out about the medication combination sofosbuvir/ledipasvir, there was a tangible sense that we were about to have an achievable cure.

Step forward to the present day. A handful of innovative new treatments have come and gone, leaving us with powerful options including two that can cover all the virus’s genotypes in one fell swoop.

Have you ever had patients say that virtual visits and technology are difficult? Have your patients avoided virtual visits due to their lack of comfort with virtual care? Have your patients ever asked for a resource center or for someone to practice virtual sessions with to overcome any challenges? The Veterans Health Administration has numerous approaches to help veterans with virtual care and technology adoption.

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.