Healthcare IT News Shares Megan Herber’s Insight on the Status of Telehealth Policies

In “ATA: What’s Ahead for Telehealth Policy After the Pandemic,” Healthcare IT News highlighted insight Health Policy & Government Relations Director Megan Herber shared in a webinar about the status of telehealth policies and payments as the COVID-19 public health emergency is set to expire.

“As we know, [President] Biden has said in recent days that the pandemic is over, so it’s possible that the technical public health emergency might expire sometime in the very near future,” said Herber. But even if providers do not serve Medicare populations, “Medicare policy trickles down,” she added.

Herber explained, “That is the current status quo right now – as long as the COVID-19 public health emergency is in place,” but noted that about five months post pandemic, “all of those waivers go away automatically unless Congress does something.”

“There is urgency [for Congress] to act – don’t wait until four months and 20 days after the pandemic ends; we need some stability,” concluded Herber. “We’d love to make it permanent, and a lot of these policies we have been asking for since before the pandemic, so it’s not really new.”