Payment parity is a major challenge for telehealth reimbursement and coverage for telemedicine services comparable to those of in-person services. Telemedicine and in-person health care have no guarantee of payment parity.
Fremont, CA: For consumers, health care costs have increased, driving them to make various choices in their care. Some skip seeing a doctor or ordering generic drugs instead of brand-name drugs; some do not go to follow-up care or skip a treatment or procedure. Because of costs, a significant percentage of patients ask about alternative treatment care or costs.
The technology and medical communities have been encouraged by these phenomena to consider telehealth as an alternative to traditional health care. 'Telehealth' is not a very well-defined term and describes a range of technologies as a means of providing services for medicine, health care and education. For medical and diagnostic information, thirty percent of patients are already using computers and mobile devices. Everything could be regarded as telehealth, from checking Web M.D. to scheduling a doctor's appointment on an iPhone.
But there are some challenges to the implementation of telehealth technology. This may make its broad implementation difficult as a means of expanding access to health care and reducing costs. Here are some challenges in telehealth:
Payment
Payment parity is a major challenge for telehealth reimbursement and coverage for telemedicine services comparable to those of in-person services. Telemedicine and in-person health care have no guarantee of payment parity. No apparatus exists to impose it, even in the 28 states in which payment parity laws have been passed. This could potentially defeat the telemedicine point of reducing health care costs and expanding access to services and could also discourage providers from providing telehealth because comparable payment is not guaranteed.
Misdiagnosis
In in-person health care, misdiagnosis often occurs, but with telehealth, the risks increase. The fact that there is no clear standard of care set by state legislatures adds to this, and quality can be uneven between one provider and the next. Misdiagnosis also has the ability to push up the total expense of the general health care system since misdiagnoses contribute to inaccurate prescriptions and treatments.
