Navigating Telehealth – Denise Leard

Hi. My name is Denise Leard, and I’m with the law firm of Brown and Fortunato, where I work in their health law group. I want to spend the next few minutes talking to you about telehealth.

So telehealth can be an amazing tool that you can use in your business. However, there’s a lot of regulations with telehealth, and you need to be careful or you’re going to get into trouble by using it.

So, pre-COVID, the purpose of telehealth was to be able to extend services to those individuals in rural areas who may not otherwise have access to those types of healthcare providers.

So to be covered by Medicare, an individual had to be in a rural area. They had to go from their home to an origination site, and then they were seen by a distant site practitioner. The physician performing the visit had to have audio and visual communication.

So fast forward, Covid shows up and they needed some flexibilities. So they put a number of waivers in place.

And what those waivers did is it expanded the ability to perform telehealth visits. you didn’t have to be in a rural area. You didn’t have to leave your home and go to an origination site to see the distant site practitioner.

But, what was still required, is that you had an audio and visual communication. So the physician conducting the telehealth visit had to be able to see and hear the patient.

The other thing that was important during Covid is that they did not waive the medical necessity requirements. So the physician still had to be able to determine there was medical necessity for any products or services that he was going to order out of that visit.

The waivers were not permission to ignore medical necessity requirements.

So, the the PHE (public health emergency) did end last spring in May. Now, in the recent 2025 physician fee schedule update, they talked about extending these and there’s currently no extension of these flexibilities.

Now we do expect that by the end of the year, there will be a legislative action to permanently extend some of those flexibilities.

So you just need to beware that if you are providing telehealth, that through the end of the year, the waivers are in place. But those waivers may be going away and you need to stay in tune with those.

Again, telehealth can be an amazing resource, but you have to be careful and make sure that you provide those services in compliance with all the regulations that are out there.

For more information on this and other important regulatory topics, please reach out to one of the healthcare attorneys at Brown and Fortunato.