Lack of evidence for telehealth fraud.

Despite evidence to the contrary, U.S. policy makers, payers, and the public continue to express apprehension that the use of telehealth is associated with increased risk of fraud and abuse. The fraudulent use of telehealth is multifaceted and complex, ranging from potentially false claims to miscoding, inaccurate billing, and kickbacks. For the past 6 years, the U.S. Federal Government has undertaken research studies to examine potential fraud issues related to the use of telehealth, including up-coding time spent with the patient, misrepresentation of the service provided, and billing for services that were not rendered. This article reviews previous efforts to assess the risk of fraud associated with the delivery of virtual care in America, concluding that there is little evidence for higher levels of fraud and abuse related to the use of telehealth.

A New Frontier in Telehealth Research: A National Telehealth Data Warehouse.

Importance: Given the rapid increase in telehealth utilization since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become essential to examining the vast amount of available data on telehealth encounters to conduct more cogent, robust, and large-scope research studies to examine the utility, cost-impact, and effect on clinical outcomes that telehealth can potentially provide. However, the diversity of data collected by numerous telehealth organizations has made that type of analysis difficult. Objective: The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), a Telehealth Center of Excellence designated by the Health Resources and Services Administration, is creating a National Telehealth Data Warehouse. Design: UMMC will develop the data warehouse in Microsoft Azure and will use a data dictionary that was created by the Center for Telehealth and eHealth Law (CTeL) to support their national cost-benefit study on the use of telehealth during COVID-19. Impact: The data warehouse will provide unparalleled opportunities to conduct cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses on telehealth, to develop and test quality measures specific to telehealth, and to understand how telehealth and reduce disparities in health care and expand access to care for everyone. The warehouse is expected to go live in the Summer of 2023.

Quality Frameworks for Virtual Care: Expert Panel Recommendations.

Given the significant advance of virtual care in the past year and half, it seems timely to focus on quality frameworks and how they have evolved collaboratively across health care organizations. Massachusetts General Hospital's (MGH) Center for TeleHealth and Mass General Brigham's (MGB) Virtual Care Program are committed to hosting annual symposia on key topics related to virtual care. Subject matter experts across the country, health care organizations, and academic medical centers are invited to participate. The inaugural MGH/MGB Virtual Care Symposium, which focused on rethinking curriculum, competency, and culture in the virtual care era, was held on September 2, 2020. The second MGH/MGB Virtual Care Symposium was held on November 2, 2021, and focused on virtual care quality frameworks. Resultant topics were (1) guiding principles necessary for the future of virtual care measurement; (2) best practices deployed to measure quality of virtual care and how they compare and align with in-person frameworks; (3) evolution of quality frameworks over time; (4) how increased adoption of virtual care has impacted patient access and experience and how it has been measured; (5) the pitfalls and barriers which have been encountered by organizations in developing virtual care quality frameworks; and (6) examples of how quality frameworks have been applied in various use cases. Common elements of a quality framework for virtual care programs among symposium participants included improving the patient and provider experience, a focus on achieving health equity, monitoring success rates and uptime of the technical elements of virtual care, financial stewardship, and clinical outcomes. Virtual care represents an evolution in the access to care paradigm that helps keep health care aligned with other modern industries in digital technology and systems adoption. With advances in health care delivery models, it is vitally important that the quality measurement systems be adapted to include virtual care encounters. New methods may be necessary for asynchronous transactions, but synchronous virtual visits and consults can likely be accommodated in traditional quality frameworks with minimal adjustments. Ultimately, quality frameworks for health care will adapt to hybrid in-person and virtual care practices.

Recommendations from the First National Academic Consortium of Telehealth.

In January 2015, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services announced targets for the transformation of Medicare reimbursement from a fee-for-service model to payments based on alternative payment models. People now use technology for virtually everything - from paying bills to purchasing almost anything; it is therefore natural to think that they will use technology to take ownership of their own health care. The remote provision of health care, where providers and patients are not in the same location, will allow patients to receive the right care, at the right time, at the right place, and in the manner they consider right for them. To date, much of the technological advances in medicine have been led by the technology creators rather than providers or patients. A meeting of leaders from academic medical centers was convened to brainstorm and explore new opportunities to educate the workforce, expand the science, and improve the delivery of quality care to patients through the use of telemedicine. The academic community needs to develop an evidence base that can inform new care delivery models, including the role for remote monitoring and wearable technology, as well as the methods by which the best patient-centered care can be provided. It is important that the future of medicine be determined by solid research and education rather than the latest "cool toy" to reach the market. Academic medical centers are in a unique position to help shape this future direction, collaborating to create innovative and efficient solutions for patient care. Specific calls for action are summarized.

Framework to Advance Oncology-Related Telehealth.

PURPOSE: As telehealth is increasingly used across the clinical care spectrum to provide patient-centered care, it is important to have robust measures to assess its impact on patient outcomes and care processes. The National Quality Forum (NQF) developed a Telehealth Framework to organize measures and inform target areas for measure development that includes the following four domains: access to care, financial impact or cost, experience, and effectiveness. Our goal is to identify and categorize within the NQF domains currently existing measures of telehealth applicable to oncology to detect priority areas for future research and measure development. METHODS: We reviewed telehealth-related measures applied to oncology care reported in systematic reviews and identified NQF-endorsed quality measures related to oncology care potentially amenable to telehealth. We organized identified measures by the NQF domains to inform suggestions for advancing the care of patients with cancer through telehealth. RESULTS: We identified 12 systematic reviews representing 183 studies reporting telehealth-related oncology research. Most studied outcomes related to diagnosis and treatment or user experience and symptom monitoring. Clinical effectiveness measures were most frequently reported (38%), and most were psychosocial. Patient, family, and/or caregiver experience was the next most frequently reported measure. There were only a few other cancer-related clinical effectiveness measures (eg, morbidity). Most NQF-endorsed oncology measures amenable to telehealth applied to the domains of access to care and effectiveness, with a lack of measures informing financial impact or cost and experience. CONCLUSION: Overall, there has been a lack of quality measures to assess use of telehealth for the care of oncology patients. Future work should focus on developing measures within each of the NQF-identified domains, with special attention to the financial impact or cost domain.

Open source electronic health records and chronic disease management.

OBJECTIVE: To study and report on the use of open source electronic health records (EHR) to assist with chronic care management within safety net medical settings, such as community health centers (CHC). METHODS AND MATERIALS: The study was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago from April to September 2010. The NORC team undertook a comprehensive environmental scan, including a literature review, a dozen key informant interviews using a semistructured protocol, and a series of site visits to CHC that currently use an open source EHR. RESULTS: Two of the sites chosen by NORC were actively using an open source EHR to assist in the redesign of their care delivery system to support more effective chronic disease management. This included incorporating the chronic care model into an CHC and using the EHR to help facilitate its elements, such as care teams for patients, in addition to maintaining health records on indigent populations, such as tuberculosis status on homeless patients. DISCUSSION: The ability to modify the open-source EHR to adapt to the CHC environment and leverage the ecosystem of providers and users to assist in this process provided significant advantages in chronic care management. Improvements in diabetes management, controlled hypertension and increases in tuberculosis vaccinations were assisted through the use of these open source systems. CONCLUSIONS: The flexibility and adaptability of open source EHR demonstrated its utility and viability in the provision of necessary and needed chronic disease care among populations served by CHC.

The use of open source electronic health records within the federal safety net.

OBJECTIVE: To conduct a federally funded study that examines the acquisition, implementation and operation of open source electronic health records (EHR) within safety net medical settings, such as federally qualified health centers (FQHC). METHODS AND MATERIALS: The study was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago from April to September 2010. The NORC team undertook a comprehensive environmental scan, including a literature review, a dozen key informant interviews using a semistructured protocol, and a series of site visits to West Virginia, California and Arizona FQHC that were currently using an open source EHR. RESULTS: Five of the six sites that were chosen as part of the study found a number of advantages in the use of their open source EHR system, such as utilizing a large community of users and developers to modify their EHR to fit the needs of their provider and patient communities, and lower acquisition and implementation costs as compared to a commercial system. DISCUSSION: Despite these advantages, many of the informants and site visit participants felt that widespread dissemination and use of open source was restrained due to a negative connotation regarding this type of software. In addition, a number of participants stated that there is a necessary level of technical acumen needed within the FQHC to make an open source EHR effective. CONCLUSIONS: An open source EHR provides advantages for FQHC that have limited resources to acquire and implement an EHR, but additional study is needed to evaluate its overall effectiveness.

Emphasizing Public Health Within a Health Information Exchange: An Evaluation of the District of Columbia's Health Information Exchange Program.

INTRODUCTION: Clinovations Government Solutions (CGS) was contracted in 2013 to conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of the District of Columbia (D.C.) Health Information Exchange (HIE) program as part of their Cooperative Agreement Grant funded by the Office of the National Coordinator in 2010. The evaluation was to focus on the progress of the HIE, how many providers and hospitals were participating in the program, and what benefits were being realized through the use of the HIE. During the course of the evaluation, the CGS team found that the use of the HIE to support public health reporting was one of its core elements. BACKGROUND: The D.C. HIE is one of 56 HIE that were funded out of the Cooperative Agreement program. The HIE program was managed by the District of Columbia Department of Health Care Finance (DHCF), which also manages the District of Columbia Medicaid Program. The program was initially designed to accomplish the following: developing state-level directories and enabling technical services for HIE within and across states; ensuring an effective model for governance and accountability; coordinating an integrated approach with Medicaid and public health; and developing or updating privacy and security requirements for HIE within and across state borders. As the evaluation progressed, the CGS team discovered that the relationship between the DHCF and the District of Columbia Department of Health (DOH) had become a cornerstone of the D.C. HIE program. METHODS: The CGS team used a mixed-methods approach for the evaluation, including a review of documents developed by the DHCF in its HIE program, including its original application. We also conducted 10 key informant interviews and moderated two small-group discussions using a semistructured protocol; and we developed a survey that measured the use, satisfaction, and future sustainability of the HIE for over 200 providers within the District of Columbia. FINDINGS: While the evaluation focused on the D.C. HIE program in its entirety, the results indicated the value of utilizing the HIE for public health reporting to enhance the surveillance activities of the DOH. Specifically, the DHCF and DOH collaboration resulted in using the HIE to electronically capture and report immunization data; and in requiring electronic lab reporting and results as part of the Meaningful Use Requirement-which can assist in detecting HIV/AIDS and providing better care for the district's high population of individuals with HIV/AIDS. Electronic lab reporting and electronic prescribing within the HIE can assist the DOH and providers in identifying specific diseases, such as tuberculosis and viral hepatitis, before they affect a significant part of the population. DISCUSSION: Given the severe health disparities in the district, the ability of the D.C. HIE program to collect public health information on affected populations will be instrumental in better understanding and identifying methods of supporting these populations through improved surveillance and identification of the appropriate treatments. The D.C. HIE program is uniquely positioned to support these populations due to the partnership of DHCF with the D.C. DOH. CONCLUSION AND NEXT STEPS: The District of Columbia has made significant strides in expanding its public health infrastructure and activities. Three key areas of growth were identified that have the potential to transform the District of Columbia's public health approach: establishing sufficient feedback loops, collection of environmental data, integration, and interoperability.