Friday, November 11, 2022, came and went with no big announcement from Health & Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, which means that federal policies affecting telemedicine will remain unchanged for at least 60 more days, or through January 11, 2023. Telemedicine is also affected by state regulations, but the relaxation of federal rules on hospitals […]
With increased use of telemedicine has come the need for physician practices and other ambulatory offices to offer technical support to patients and family caregivers who need help to connect, in particular for video visits. As if physicians and their office staff don’t already have enough to do! In an article for the Harvard Business […]
As the impact of the coronavirus pandemic became apparent in March 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services waived existing restrictions on telemedicine services. That expansion of coverage created an opportunity to study changes in usage patterns before and after services suddenly became available to a large population. Authors of one such study published […]
Editor’s Note. After waiting in the wings for years, telemedicine took center stage in the early days of the pandemic. Elisabeth Rosenthal urges caution and deliberate choices as we determine what role telemedicine should play in the service of patients going forward. This story also ran in The New York Times. Earlier in the pandemic […]
The threat posed by COVID-19 has upended daily life all over the globe. The switch from pre-COVID normal to COVID abnormal was jarring, but as time goes on, some of those changes will persist as the new normal. Telemedicine, for example, was a long time coming, became outpatient medicine’s new ballgame practically overnight, and now […]
Editor’s Note: This story, first published by Kaiser Health News, describes adjustments made by patients and clinicians at River Bend Family Medicine, a physician’s office in Maryland, during the coronavirus outbreak. It demonstrates both the advantages of telemedicine and the irreplaceable role of personal relationships in medicine. Patients would often stop by River Bend Family […]