Amy Lerman, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in Part B News, in “Use the OIG’s Data Brief on Telehealth to Boost Your Compliance Efforts,” by Julia Kyles. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
Check Medicare claims data, review the new program integrity measures for telehealth services and consider other telehealth-specific risks to avoid compliance issues for these services. Those are three ways health care attorneys say that practices can incorporate guidance from a recent report on telehealth services into their telehealth compliance efforts. …
The report also helps providers better understand their patients and the sort of services they want, says Amy Lerman, member of the firm with Epstein Becker Green in Washington, D.C.
“An important and general lesson that health care organizations can take from the OIG data brief is the much more significant (compared to pre-pandemic), and perhaps more realistic, look at how the Medicare population is seeking to utilize telehealth services,” Lerman says. "Even though telehealth proponents have long argued about the utility of telehealth, telehealth utilization remained very low prior to the PHE, she adds.
“In the data brief, OIG has considered data relating to telehealth usage by Medicare beneficiaries during the pandemic,” Lerman explains. “What is most significant about this data universe is that it is so unlike anything that previously existed, and it therefore has allowed OIG to get a much more detailed look at who was using telehealth services, what services were being used, and how providers were doing with respect to billing for such services.”
