medicare

The Permanente Journal: Benefits and Challenges of Remote Patient Monitoring as Perceived by Health Care Practitioners: A Systematic Review  Remote patient monitoring (RPM), or telemonitoring, offers ways for health care practitioners to gather real-time information on the physiological conditions of patients. As telemedicine, and thus telemonitoring, is becoming increasingly relevant in today’s society, understanding the [...]

Kaiser Permanente: Most Telehealth Users Are Interested in Using It Again  A survey of 1,000 Kaiser Permanente Northern California patients who used a phone or video visit to see their primary care doctor in 2020 found that most were satisfied with their visit, and two-thirds are interested in using telemedicine again. The survey, published in [...]

Vermont Department of Health: Suicide Data-Linkage Project The Vermont Department of Health released a report, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which documented the statistics and put forward recommendations for trying to reduce the upward trend of suicide in Vermont. About 76 percent had health insurance and had seen a [...]

California Health Care Foundation: Telehealth Use and Experiences Among California Adults  California’s Medi-Cal program is leveraging telehealth to meet patient needs. Many of the telehealth coverage and reimbursement flexibilities enacted during the pandemic were made permanent in 2022, including payment parity for services provided in person or by telehealth. This issue brief uses data from [...]

FAIR Health: Nationwide Telehealth Use Held Steady in June According to Fair Health's Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker, telehealth sessions comprised 5.4 percent of claim lines in June, the same amount as the prior month. Mental health conditions continued to top the list of Fair Health’s five most common telehealth diagnoses for June. The median allowed amount [...]

Health Affairs: A Study Of Patients’ Experiences Selecting Telehealth Versus In-Person Care  Approximately one-third of behavioral health patients seeking therapy or medication visits said their clinicians did not offer both telehealth and in-person care. The study conducted by RAND Corporation found that 45 percent of behavioral health patients did not believe their clinicians considered their preferences for [...]

BMC Medicine: Telehealth in Antenatal Care  This narrative review examines the impact of telehealth on obstetric care. The review found that adoption of telehealth technologies may improve the antenatal care experience for women and reduce health care expenditure without adversely impacting health outcomes for the mother or baby. Health economic studies also suggest telehealth has [...]

JAMA Health Forum: Telehealth and In-Person Mental Health Service Utilization and Spending, 2019 to 2022  Trends in mental health service utilization and spending before expiration of the public health emergency (PHE) in May 2023 are largely undocumented. Researchers assessed monthly telehealth vs in-person utilization and spending rates for mental health services among commercially insured US adults between [...]

Software Advice: 95 Percent of Patients Say Telehealth is Easiest Way to Access Health Services Software Advice, an information services company, conducted a survey in which 95 percent of participating patients reported telehealth to be the easiest option when seeking a diagnosis. Additionally, 67 percent of the respondents rated the process as "extremely easy." Software [...]

JAMA Network Open: Telemedicine Visits in US Skilled Nursing Facilities  Skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) in the United States rapidly adopted telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was linked to improved access to psychiatry visits. Researchers found that, compared with 2018-2019, SNFs with high telehealth use in 2020-2021 provided about 20.2 percent more psychiatry visits per resident [...]