In one of his recent columns for The Oklahoman, Scott Meacham,
CEO and president of Oklahoma City-based i2E Inc., touched on one of the
results from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Whole industries are changing before our eyes,” Meacham wrote.
“Physicians and insurers who may have been reluctant before are embracing the
touch and efficiency of telemedicine.”
That’s putting it mildly — and it's likely to be something that
continues long after this coronavirus is behind us.
In mid-March, the early days of this crisis in the United States, an
article on the website Slate noted, “We often think of telemedicine as a means
to see doctors from a distance or simply to add convenience. But its particular
value in the current situation is how it reallocates in-person care, time and
resources to those who need it most.”
Americans and their health care providers are taking advantage. The
Wall Street Journal reports that Ascension, a health system with facilities in
20 states, handled about 10,000 online visits in March, compared with 500 in
earlier months. Televisits for CommonSpirit Health, which operates in 21
states, doubled about every seven days through early April. The Sanger Heart
and Vascular Institute moved most of its outpatient office visits to the cloud,
seeing about 450 patients per day.
Telemedicine has been part of Oklahoma health care for some time. The
website eVisit.com notes our state was an early adopter, approving a parity law
in 1997 that “requires telemedicine coverage by Medicaid managed care, workers’
compensation programs, disability insurer programs, and health care service
plans.”
Oklahoma also is “unique,” the website says, in that it provides the
needed internet technology at no cost to not-for-profit hospitals, county
health departments and Federally Qualified Health Centers. In addition, the
state’s Medicaid program reimburses for a range of telemedicine services such
as neonatal, speech language pathology and behavioral health services, and in
recent years has worked to expand telehealth coverage.
The ability to reach physicians and physician assistants over the
internet is particularly important in a rural state like Oklahoma. Amid the
pandemic, the state Corporation Commission developed an emergency response
process intended to help hospitals and health care providers get funds approved
to increase their bandwidth.
At the federal level, a waiver of rules by Congress is making
telemedicine more accessible for senior citizens on traditional Medicare, with
more services being covered. Those waivers will likely end when the pandemic
passes; the Journal is among those urging Congress to reconsider, and remove
other regulatory barriers.
Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, says “the genie’s out of the bottle.”
“I think it’s fair to say that the advent of telehealth has been just
completely accelerated, and it’s taken this crisis to push us to a new
frontier,” Verma told the Journal. “But there’s absolutely no going back.”
Call it one positive outcome from this dastardly pandemic.
About OrionNet Systems
OrionNet is an Oklahoma small
business founded in 2001. OrionNet has designed, developed and supported
applications created both for the client-server and web environments, as well
as developing, marketing and supporting a commercial application for the
counseling centers industry.
Visit the OrionNet Systems’
website, www.iorion.com, or
their social media pages, https://twitter.com/ThinkHealth & https://www.facebook.com/pages/OrionNet-Systems/139352156150090 for more information.
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