Telemedicine News
New Federal Legislation Impacts Telehealth
(Source: Federal Telemedicine News, July 13, 2008)
The Senate has passed comprehensive Medicare legislation. This legislation will also expand the list of telehealth originating sites to include hospital-based renal dialysis centers, skilled nursing facilities, and community mental health centers. The vote was the second attempt at passing this legislation after a vote for closure failed in June. The legislation now goes to the President for either his signature or veto.
In other legislation, the Senate and House spending bills will boost telehealth funding. Both the Senate and House appropriations committees released FY 2009 spending bills that will increase funding for the Office for the Advancement of Telehealth (OAT) to $7,100,000 from a FY 2008 level of $6,700,000, while the Senate bill would increase OAT funding to a full $8,000,000.
The "Promoting Health Information Technology Act of 2008" (HR 6179) introduced on June 4, seeks to utilize public-private partnerships and tax incentives to help the adoption of the act. No action had been taken as of mid-August in the House Ways and Means Committee.
A practice of five physicians could easily spend upwards of $200,000 to implement an electronic health record. To speed adoption, the PHIT Act would allow physicians who purchase HIT to deduct a larger portion of this business expense more quickly. The Act would also eliminate the arbitrary 2013 sunset HHS has placed on hospitals providing physicians with software for electronic health records.
The legislation would strengthen telehealth in several ways. Section 303 in the legislation would help to provide telehealth services across state lines, calls for a study on expanding home health and related telehealth services, examine how to pay for home health telehealth services, and look at ways to expand the list of sites to include county or public mental health clinics.
The legislation requests a study done by the Office for the Advancement of Telehealth to report on the use of “store and forward” technology for telehealth. This study needs to include an assessment of the feasibility and the costs for expanding the use of these technologies.