Society Pleased to See Senate Letter Asking for Changes to Telehealth, Medical Director Registry

This week, the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Health sent a letter to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar asking the agency to implement a set of recommendations to combat Alzheimer’s disease. In the letter, Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Debbie Stebanow (D-MI), chair and ranking member of the committee, asked HHS to improve care for Alzheimer’s patients and expand resources for caregivers.  

Among the recommendations were two Society asks:  

• Create a Nursing Home Staff Database: Nursing home medical directors play an important role in the coordination and quality of care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease residing in long-term care facilities. We urge CMS to establish and operate a publicly available database for nursing home medical directors so that families and caregivers have a reliable source of contact. Such a database could be posted to the CMS website in a similar fashion to how CMS posts Medicare Part D contact information. 
• Revise the Limit on Billable Telehealth Visits for Nursing Care Facilities: Currently, CMS allows just one telehealth visit every 30 days in nursing care facilities. Several of our stakeholders argue that this policy is arbitrary and limits access to care for patients living with Alzheimer’s disease in institutional settings. CMS has attempted to address this concern by revising the limit to once every three days in its proposed physician fee schedule rule for calendar year 2021. CMS has also noted the potentially greater acuity and complexity of Medicare beneficiaries in nursing care facilities, as well as the importance of in-person care in that context. We find access to telehealth in this setting to be important to the care provided to Alzheimer’s disease patients, and we support CMS efforts to expand telehealth access across settings where clinically appropriate and with adequate beneficiary protections in place.

The Society will continue to work with Congress and HHS to implement these important changes. Read the entire letter now.