SIS-11 - Telehealth for Pain Providers: Necessary Attributes for a Successful Clinical Practice

Despite the advances in technology seen over the past two decades, the US healthcare system witnessed minimal, if steady, advances in the use of telehealth services. This changed dramatically throughout the past two years, primarily driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed for an exponential explosion of telehealth adoption rates and physician/patient acceptance. Specifically, the number of telehealth visits rose 63-fold from 840,000 visits in 2019 to 52.7 million visits in 2020, per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Most importantly, CMS paid “freely” for telehealth current procedural terminology codes due to COVID and has since announced its intention to make existing telehealth payment codes permanent and to even expand payment options. This has created problems for clinicians in terms of choosing from the telehealth platforms available, and engaging in such services with little to no regulatory protocols in place to guide use. This session will discuss the attributes of telehealth platforms that pain medicine and addiction treatment practices should seek when searching for a platform, as well as attributes to avoid. The course will also show how platforms with the ideal structure and technology attributes can increase care plan adherence and medication compliance, provide liability protection, improve physician/patient communication, and capture a billable benefit for medically necessary services that have traditionally been an expense to the practice.