Remote monitoring of patients with chronic diseases can improve their care and reduce hospitalizations, but it has been slow to catch on because Medicare does not reimburse doctors for care provided remotely, representatives of medical-device manufacturers said today.
The trade group, the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), is pushing legislation that would change the reimbursement rules.
A bill to require Medicare to reimburse doctors for remote monitoring of patients is pending in the Senate. Julie Cohen, the association’s vice president of government affairs, said the group is now trying to get that bill, with some of its coverage scaled back to hold down added costs, included in the Medicare bill being drafted by the Senate Finance Committee.
In support of its position, AdvaMed released a report with facts and figures on the benefits of remote monitoring of patients with diseases such as chronic heart failure, diabetes and lung failure.
The report, “Telehomecare and Remote Monitoring: An Outcomes Overview,” includes considerable evidence from the Veterans Health Administration, one of the most advanced users of telemedicine.
“For example,” it states, “one study of frail, elderly veterans in the VA Connecticut Healthcare System who suffered from [chronic heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or diabetes] found that those who received home telehealth services used fewer nurse visits at home, bed-days-of-care, urgent visits, and transportation to facilities—yet had equivalent outcomes—in comparison to the participants who received standard care. Though telehealth added $1,666 to the costs during the six-month study, the overall health care costs decreased by 58 percent for the group receiving telehomecare.”
The report acknowledges that some of the studies pointing to benefits of remote patient monitoring are not rigorous in comparing outcomes of those with home monitoring and those without. It also says some costs will increase.
“In particular, providers will likely experience some increased costs because of their responsibility to monitor the in-coming data. Wherever possible, they will want that monitoring to be automated so that normal monitoring results can be recorded and filed for future reference, but out-of-target-range data will be brought to their attention,” it states.
Nonetheless, it concludes, “the evidence suggests that telehealth, telehomecare, and remote monitoring may be one of the only economically viable ways to manage an aging population, the prevalence of chronic disease and the growing constraints on health care spending.”
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
