The Increasing Acceptance of Telemedicine for Care Delivery in the Post COVID-19 Era
It is now clear that Telemedicine is gaining increasing acceptance as a direct consequence of the Coronavirus outbreak.
The bigger question is if telemedicine will continue and possibly even grow post-COVID-19 and, as such, become the new normal, or, is this just a passing phase that has gained popularity out of necessity and will wane off. As soon as patients can regularly and without fear of disease visit their doctors, Telemedicine may go back to its earlier standing as more of an exception rather than the norm.
Manage your time better with Telemedicine
Undoubtedly, the rarest resource we have today is time. All of us have just 24 hours in a day and how we make the best use of this time is up to us. As people strive to do more with their time, telemedicine offers a more efficient solution to managing the time of patients without negatively impacting the time allocation of doctors. Accordingly, it appears that as patients, as well as doctors, look at ways to improve efficiency, Telemedicine will only grow in the future.
Telemedicine and Reimbursement levels
The role of government policies in growing telemedicine services is critical. The norms for Medicare reimbursement rates will impact that pre-corona was somewhat lower than in-office visits, which created a financial disincentive for doctors to encourage it.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Medicare rates for telemedicine are currently very close to those for the in-office visits, and, therefore, healthcare providers are not negatively impacted.
What we do not know is if Medicare will rollback reimbursements post-corona to what they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. It should be noted that Medicare rates play such a significant role in the universe of reimbursements because many carriers reimburse at a multiple of Medicare rates. Accordingly, Medicare not only sets the reimbursement for Medicare itself but for all the carriers that base their reimbursement rates on base Medicare rates.
Telemedicine offers several benefits.
Improved time management and productivity. From a macroeconomic perspective to the extent patients will not have to travel to doctors’ offices during work hours and allow buffers for traffic, etc., the amount of work that is lost to medical visits will be significantly curtailed, and as such will increase productivity.
If telemedicine continues to grow, it would appear that it will affect the amount of time and the office set up that healthcare providers have.
Telemedicine benefits are different for different specialties. Obviously, for mental health providers in general, and psychiatry in particular, the shift to telemedicine makes sense and can be done without encountering any headwinds. Unless a practitioner’s specialty is Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or other focus or concentration deficits, in which case telemedicine may not be as effective.
At the other end of the spectrum, it would be difficult for dentists to service their patients by telemedicine.
However, internists or GPs, as well as pediatricians and numerous other medical disciplines, can easily migrate anywhere from 40 to 75% of the visits to telemedicine.
New Business and Care Delivery Models likely to emerge. To the extent this happens, those doctors may not need the type of office setups they currently have but might need to physically see patients one or two days a week. Office rents, staffing, and general overhead are not justified if the examination room(s) are only utilized one or two days a week.
What might make more sense is for doctors to rent an exam room on a per diem basis at urgent care clinics? If this happens, it will blur the lines between the older model of patient/doctor relationships to the ever-growing urgent care center models. We also believe that this could create new business models of shared medical office spaces.
Only the future will tell where we end up, but it pays to give some thought concerning where we are headed and the relative advantages and disadvantages. What do you think? Let us know by sending an email to us at info@medicalbillingwholesalers.com.
Medical Billing Wholesalers is helping clinicians make the transition to Telemedicine and adopt billing practices that help them get accurate and timely reimbursements for the services rendered. Read related articles:
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