What is Telemedicine?
Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities. It is also used to save lives in critical care and emergency situations. Although there were distant precursors to telemedicine, it is essentially a product of 20th century telecommunication and information technologies. These technologies permit communications between patient and medical staff with both convenience and fidelity, as well as the transmission of medical, imaging and health informatics data from one site to another. Early forms of telemedicine achieved with telephone and radio have been supplemented with video telephony, advanced diagnostic methods supported by distributed client/server applications, and additionally with telemedical devices to support in-home care.
Telemedicine by Billing Care Solutions:
Telemedicine services are the practices of using technology to deliver medical care remotely. With telemedicine, a healthcare practitioner can use a telecommunications infrastructure to deliver care to a patient miles away.
Physicians use a variety of telecommunications technologies to deliver remote clinical services, such as mobile apps, online video conferencing and webcams, telephones, and even on-site kiosks. Since telemedicine involves private patient information, all telemedicine infrastructure technology needs to be HIPAA compliant and secure.
Since telemedicine services allow providers to care for patients from a distant location, it delivers both comfort and convenience for those who’d prefer virtual appointments. Patients no longer need to drive to their physician’s office or sit in a waiting room while sick. Instead, they can receive medical care without leaving their house. While this is especially beneficial for patients in remote areas, telemedicine has been impactful for those socially distancing and seeking medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Billing Care Solutions provides all the services that are implemented in Covid-19 pandemic. Billing Care solutions use variety of telecommunication technologies to deliver remote clinical services.
How COVID-19 Has Impacted the Role of Telemedicine:
Until the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine was greatly underutilized. While telemedicine services have been available for many years now, hospitals and other providers had originally been slow to embrace the technology. Even before the pandemic crisis, there was substantial evidence that telemedicine can greatly increase the overall availability and efficiency of healthcare services.
The COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak has forced many healthcare providers who were either hesitant to provide telemedicine services or lacked the HIPAA-compliant IT infrastructure to reliably deliver them to greatly ramp up their telehealth capacity. Even in the first weeks of pandemic lockdowns, demand for virtual medical services grew exponentially, creating a tremendous opportunity for healthcare practices that have made investments in telehealth.
Telemedicine Billing Tips for Healthcare Providers:
Telemedicine and Telehealth billing, even before the COVID-19 was a tricky task. The constantly changing regulations and their overlapping features with other medical codes have seen it become the center of much confusion. This increased confusion can be easily rectified by following the guidelines mentioned here.
- Make Sure the Patient Has Coverage
- Be Aware of the Latest Rules and Regulations
- Documentation is The Key
- Billing a Facility and Place of Service rules
- The GT 95 Modifier and CPT Codes Applicable
- Asking the Payer for Its Coverage Guideline
Billing Care Solutions in Medical billing and telemedicine has different regulations per state. It can be very difficult to learn and implement these regulations to obtain proper reimbursement. To ease the process, Billing Care Solutions offers medical billing telemedicine services. They are staffed with experts on the subject to ensure healthcare professionals get their due.