Health Affairs: State and licensure policies impact telehealth adoption
Telehealth adoption at U.S. hospitals largely hinges on state reimbursement and licensure policies that support its use, according to a study published in Health Affairs.
Researchers examined national data from the Information Technology (IT) Supplement to the American Hospital Association 2012 Annual Survey of Hospitals, which encompassed 2,891 acute care, nonfederal hospitals nationwide.
Overall, 42 percent (1,208) of hospitals sampled had adopted telehealth as of late 2012. Hospitals located in states with policies that require private payers to reimburse for telehealth services to the same extent as face-to-face services were more likely to adopt these technologies. State policies that required out-of-state providers to have special licenses to deliver telehealth services to Medicaid patients had the inverse impact of less adoption, according to the study.
“Our results suggest that states seeking to promote telehealth through reimbursement should focus on broad legislation instead of on paying for individual telehealth approaches, such as live video or store and forward,” wrote lead author Julia Adler-Milstein, assistant professor at the school of information and the school of public health, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues.
Broader reimbursement policies “may give hospitals more latitude to choose the type of telehealth to pursue and make it more likely that any type of investment in telehealth will pay off for them,” the authors wrote.
Other findings:
- Hospitals with strong technological capabilities, as measured by the presence of a cardiac intensive care unit, were more likely to adopt telehealth
- Hospitals that were part of a larger system, teaching hospitals and rural hospitals all were more likely to adopt telehealth
- Hospitals in a competitive market were more likely to use telehealth
- For-profit hospitals were much less likely than their nonprofit counterparts to have adopted telehealth.
To read the full study, go here.