The House Committee on Ways and Means marked up a series of health care bills on May 8.  Among them is the “Preserving Telehealth, Hospital, and Ambulance Access Act,” which includes provisions that impact a range of providers and care settings. This bill passed out of the Committee by a vote of 41-0.

This bill authorizes the continuation of the Acute Hospital at Home Waiver program through Dec 31, 2029. LeadingAge supports this extension though, as we noted in our March 2024 statement for the record, we hope that continued work is done within this waiver to improve partnerships with home health and to support caregivers.

This bill continues extensions of the telehealth authorities authorized during the Spring of 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These authorities were last extended in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 and are set to expire in December. This bill authorizes a two year extension through December 2026.

The specific policies under consideration in this bill include:

• Allowing Medicare patients to continue to receive telehealth services in their home. The extension allows for the originating site for telehealth services to be in the home.
• There are no geographic restrictions for originating site for  telehealth services—without the extension, pre-COVID restrictions on originating sites would return, severely limiting where telehealth can be utilized.
• Allowing the use of using audio-only communication platforms. The legislation authorizes the continued use of audio-only platforms; CMS then assigns codes that are eligible for audio-only billing.
• Flexibility around the in-person visit for mental health services: the legislation continues the policy that no in-person visit is required to initiate mental and behavioral health services via telehealth.
• Under the extension, telehealth services can continue to be provided by all eligible Medicare providers

CMS has an ongoing list of which codes are billable via telehealth, whether they are eligible for audio-only, and whether the code is permanently or provisionally billable via telehealth.

Also extended in this legislation is the flexibility for hospice providers to perform the face to face recertification via telehealth. Read “House Proposal Extends Hospice Face-to-Face Flexibility” for more details.