Ever since the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) was declared in 2020, telehealth billing rules have changed repeatedly, making it difficult to keep up. While many telehealth flexibilities are still in place, some will be going away effective January 1, 2025. That’s the word from the 2025 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule, which CMS released on November 1. Primary care physicians may be particularly interested in how the Final Rule will impact telehealth, advanced primary care management, and complexity of care.
VA Grant Program Seeks to Expand Telehealth Access
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is proposing to eliminate copayments for all VA telehealth services and establish a grant program to fund designated VA telehealth access points in non-VA facilities, with a focus on rural and medically underserved communities.
The proposed grant program, called Accessing Telehealth through Local Area Stations (ATLAS), would provide funding to organizations — including nonprofits and private businesses — to offer veterans comfortable, private spaces equipped with high-speed internet access and the technology to meet with VA providers remotely.
Large language models can complete 50 simultaneous tasks and drive a seventeen fold cost reduction, but any additional tasks will cause performance deterioration, according to a study published Nov. 18 in Nature. Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City conducted more than 300,000 experiments to stress test LLMs, according to lead author Eyal Klang, MD. Dr. Klang is director of Icahn Mount Sinai's generative AI research program.
Fierce Healthcare hosted its second annual in-person Payer Summit conference in Austin, Texas, on Nov. 13-14. Payer industry executives gathered with Fierce Healthcare journalists to discuss the most pressing issues for U.S. payers like prior authorization, value-based care and pharmacy benefits. The first day panels included discussions of individual exchange plans and broker fraud, the changing landscape of Medicare Advantage (MA) given this year's high-profile exits and the staggering changes to Medicare Part D in 2025. Payer experts also discussed the shared burden of prior authorization and how to make healthcare insurance more equitable.
The American Hospital Association (AHA) urged the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate to act on key priorities before the end of the year in comments on November 12. AHA requested Congress continue providing relief from Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital Payment cuts and continue the Medicare-dependent Hospitals and Low-volume Adjustment programs set to expire on December 31.
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