Telemedicine is Dying

By Alex Tabarrok.

"Bloomberg: Prior to the Covid era, telehealth accounted for less than 1% of outpatient care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Telehealth services have since surged, at their peak accounting for 40% of outpatient visits for mental health and substance use.

Unfortunately, as I warned last year telemedicine is being wound back as regulations which were lifted for the pandemic emergency are put back into place.

Telemedicine exploded in popularity after COVID-19 hit, but limits are returning for care delivered across state lines.

…Over the past year, nearly 40 states and Washington, D.C., have ended emergency declarations that made it easier for doctors to use video visits to see patients in another state, according to the Alliance for Connected Care, which advocates for telemedicine use.

…To state medical boards, the patient’s location during a telemedicine visit is where the appointment takes place. One of MacDonald’s hospitals, Massachusetts General, requires doctors to be licensed in the patient’s state for virtual visits.

I know people who have had to travel over the Virginia/Maryland border just to find a wifi spot to have a telemedicine appointment with their MD physician. Ridiculous.

As I wrote earlier:

….telemedicine innovations pioneered during the pandemic should remain as options. No one doubts that some medical services are better performed in-person nor that requiring in-person visits limits some types of fraud and abuse. Nevertheless, the goal should be to ensure quality by regulating the provider of medical services not regulating how they perform their services. Communications technology is improving at a record pace. We have moved from telephones to Facetime and soon will have even more sophisticated virtual presence technology that can be integrated with next generation Apple watches and Fitbits that gather medical information. We want medical care to build on the progress in other industries and not be bound to 19th and 20th century technology."