Essay on Telemedicine: Washington DC to Provide Services via Husky Programs and Medicaid

Telemedicine is deemed a blessing, especially for people from remote areas since it avails high-level medical facilities in effective ways at low costs. Currently, in Washington DC, it has been announced that Chip programs and Connecticut's Medicaid that are known as Husky will be used to provide services via telemedicine. This decision was arrived at by the Department of social services.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Certain psychiatric services like family therapy, individual therapy plus medication management will incorporate the above changes permanently. During the current public health emergency, the changes will be temporary for medically provided treatment through telemedicine (Karim, & Bajwa, 2011)

This announcement by the Connecticut department of social services is seen as a significant development in the capability to serve patients who have medical needs and behavioral needs during the social distancing (Mohktar et al., 2013). Telemedicine is considered to enable medical practitioners to provide services to unreachable patients, perhaps due to mental health conditions or anxiety. It is also significantly cutting off the need for patients to visit hospitals physically, and it is vital in curbing transmission of illnesses like the current COVID-19.

The Department of social services has released some bulletins providing more information about telemedicine. A temporary waive on any requirements set by state laws has been set too. In the bulletin, some services were slowly allowed to be provided by Telehealth by those authorized to carry out the services in person. They include children behavioral health services (BH) like EMPS (Emergency Mobile Psychiatric Services) (codes 59484 and 59485) and EDT (Extended Day Treatment), non-group services (Code H2012) (Mohktar et al., 2015). Other services included are targeted are case management (T 1016), Family therapy without the patient (90846), and Autism spectrum disorder treatment services (97153 and H 2014).

Conclusion

In conclusion, guidance on billing and documentation of Telehealth as provided by DSS incorporates the following examples. One is that payment rates are set the same as that of in-person services. Secondly, documentation is to be maintained by both the originating site provider and the distance site provider. Thirdly, no claims are to be submitted when Telehealth services are not provided or completed, maybe as a result of technical issues. Last is that distant site providers are to avail of an applicable Telehealth modifier to the claim for services.

References

Karim, S., & Bajwa, I. S. (2011, August). Clinical decision support system based virtual telemedicine. In 2011 Third International Conference on Intelligent Human-Machine Systems and Cybernetics (Vol. 1, pp. 16-21). IEEE.

Mohktar, M. S., Sukor, J. A., Redmond, S. J., Basilakis, J., & Lovell, N. H. (2015). Effect of home telehealth data quality on decision support system performance. Procedia Computer Science, 64, 352-359.

Mohktar, M. S., Lin, K., Redmond, S. J., Basilakis, J., & Lovell, N. H. (2013). Design of a decision support system for a home telehealth application. International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications (IJEHMC), 4(3), 68-79..