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The Impact of Telehealth on Quality, Access, and Cost in Cancer Care

December 2021, Vol 11, No 12

The use of telehealth in the fee-for-service program surged by more than 4000% during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Policy changes helped to enable not only quick adoption of telehealth services, but voracious innovation, enabling allocation of appropriate resources to rural and urban disadvantaged communities, said Chevon Rariy, MD, Vice President and Chair, Virtual Health Care, and Director, Telehealth Program, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Chicago, IL, who moderated a panel at the 11th Annual Summit of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care in 2021 on the impact of telehealth and digital tools on quality, access, and cost in cancer care.

“I do think that in the years ahead, we’re going to see a lot more individuals have access to the right type of expertise for their disease, and not allow their zip code to basically determine their medical destiny,” said Lewis Levy, MD, FACP, Chief Medical Officer, Teladoc Health, Boston, MA.

“Further expansion requires a change in the statute for fee-for-service,” said Lee Fleisher, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Director, Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, Centers for Medicare & FMedicaid Services (CMS), Baltimore, MD. “We do have what’s called virtual check-ins that have been proposed, initially time codes of 1 to 10 minutes. But we propose to pay for 11 to 20 minutes.”

In addition to covering benefits in Medicare Parts A and B, Medicare Advantage Plans can offer additional telehealth services. “We’re continuing to explore where we think this [telehealth] should go,” he said.

Allowing for Diversity of Services

“Our electronic health record has a telehealth system built within it,” said Melissa Dillmon, MD, Hematologist/Oncologist, Harbin Clinic Medical Oncology, Rome, GA. “It has been a monumental change in the way we think about things, but I think it has been a tremendous service.”

Telehealth visits at her clinic numbered approximately 7000 per month early in the pandemic, dipped to approximately 2000 over the summer of 2021, and increased again with the emergence of the Delta variant, she noted.

“One of the areas that we are most excited about is around delivering a diversity of services through our platform,” said Dr Levy, referring to “the ability to reread the original pathology and get all relevant imaging and data regarding case reviews that can result in very significant changes in diagnoses and treatment plans for patients in the oncology space.”

Sara Dolcetti, MBA, MS, Oncology Solutions and Business Development Leader, Philips, Boston, MA, said that her organization is focused on ensuring that telehealth services are not a pandemic-only tool. Philips is also helping its members operationalize hybrid approaches, “because we know that telehealth is not for everyone nor for every situation,” she said. “The third thing we’re focused on is acknowledging that we had a problem with access and with disparities well before the pandemic hit. We believe there is a unique role that telehealth has in terms of eliminating disparities. It’s not only an opportunity, but an obligation that we have as a society.”

Real-Time Information

GoMo Health integrates psychosocial support into the clinical pathway and the protocol to better engage health at home, said Bob Gold, MS, Chief Behavioral Technologist and Chief Executive Officer at GoMo Health, Asbury Park, NJ. “Especially with oral oncolytics at home, getting real-time information from the patient and feeding it back for treatment decisions has reduced avoidable emergency department visits and readmits by more than 50%, resulting in a better experience for the patient,” he said. The real-time data presentation also helps to reduce oncologist and nurse fatigue, he added.

“One of the earliest televisits I did was with an elderly woman, and she couldn’t get here. She didn’t have a smart device,” recounted Dr Dillmon. “Home health went out to her home. Took the iPad. We did a telehealth visit. I got to see her. They did her vitals right there while I was watching her. They were able to do things for me. Otherwise, I don’t know when that woman would’ve felt safe coming back into my office. That was to me, an eye-opener about what the future might hold.”

Access to Care

In response to the COVID-19 public health emergency, CMS allowed consultations from institutions out of state, temporarily exempting the state-based licensing requirement, said Dr Fleisher. “After the public health emergency, whether we use telehealth or not, whether we will allow practice across state lines is a major question,” he said.

The geographic and originating site limitations were put in place in 1997, which was a decade before the release of the iPhone, said Ann Mond Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, American Telemedicine Association, Arlington, VA. The geographic waivers granted by CMS during the pandemic should be made permanent. Otherwise, we are going to go off what we call “a telehealth cliff,” she noted. “It is going to be disastrous for Americans, both clinicians and consumers.”

Collecting outcomes data on telehealth interventions will be important to CMS in making future reimbursement decisions, said Dr Fleisher. Although randomized studies would be ideal, “we’re in the middle of a big experiment right now,” admitted Ms Johnson. “We have to grab the information where we can and start laying a path forward, so that real world data can inform the next steps.”

While the focus has been on broadband as the key culprit in terms of having access to telehealth services across the country, “what we’ve found is that broadband and connectivity is really the tip of the proverbial iceberg,” said Ms Johnson. “In other words, there are much more profound issues that we have to resolve as it relates to ensuring that people get access to services where and when they need them. If you look beyond broadband and connectivity, you have affordability of the devices, of the data plan, of the services themselves, and ensuring that people can actually afford to have these things done or afford access to them.”

Creative thinking in not only the regulatory atmosphere but in the payment structure, including incorporation of telehealth into value-based payment arrangements, is needed to pave the way forward for virtual care, said Dr Levy.

Reference

  1. 1. Whaley CM, Pera MF, Cantor J, et al. Changes in health services use among commercially insured US populations during the COVID-19 pandemic. JAMA Netw Open. 2020;3:e2024984.

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