Patients and health care professionals have been quick to adopt telemedicine and digital health technologies. In the last five years, the legal landscape for telehealth insurance coverage and reimbursement has expanded in several ways:
- More organizations are implementing and expanding robust virtual care programs to supplement their traditional in-person offerings.
- In rural areas, phone coverage helps those with limited access to broadband internet and in-person care.
- With telehealth and digital health resources, patients also get a boost in mental health care because these tools help address the imbalance in supply and demand.
- More states changed their laws to prohibiting exclusive telehealth platform arrangements, increasing competition among software companies and allowing individual clinics and hospitals to make decisions based on what works for them and their patients.
- There has been progress with payment parity — reimbursing providers at the same rate for telehealth as in-person, but there is still a way to go.
All of this together is steady progress, and it codifies by law improvements that patients have loved. Unfortunately, the market cannot rely on the health care industry to make these changes voluntarily — the laws passed by individual states serve as the bridge to solidify telehealth-based services as a core health insurance benefit for the patients who use them.