Nixon Law Group’s Partner, Rebecca Gwilt, was quoted extensively in an article appearing in Home Health Care News regarding her views on the legal case for home health telehealth reimbursement.
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The burden on the staff and residents of long-term care facilities, including nursing facilities and skilled nursing facilities, has increased significantly around the country. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in response to feedback from industry stakeholders, and under new 1135 waiver authorities granted to it in the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, implemented several policy changes to support long term care facilities, including changes enabling practitioners to remotely provide services to these facilities and to remotely supervise on-site providers.
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Join us for a webinar to explain the most recent regulatory and reimbursement changes around the Remote Patient Monitoring, Telehealth, e-Visit, and Virtual Check-in CPT codes, during COVID-19, and what those changes mean from a practical perspective.
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For nearly two years, digital healthcare companies and data brokers from across the country have been preparing to comply with California’s newest data privacy law—the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). Companies are making determinations about the applicability of this law to their operations, developing inventories of the types of consumer information they collect, and implementing operational and procedural changes in order to comply with the requirements of the law’s requirements. For those companies whose operations are not subject to the CCPA law, some have determined that it may be a strategic advantage to voluntarily adhere to some of the CCPA’s requirements, as they are likely to be adopted by other states (and even the Federal Government) as privacy legislation continues to proliferate. If you are a digital healthcare company or healthcare data broker and you’ve not initiated these conversations within your company, now is the time.
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In this article on the proposed changes to the fraud and abuse regulations, we focus on OIG’s proposed Patient Engagement and Support safe harbor to AKS and CMP and discuss how this new safe harbor may affect care management services vendors such as Chronic Care Management (CCM), Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), Transitional Care Management (TCM), and Behavioral Health Integration (BHI) services vendors.
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the Final Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for CY 2020 (the “2020 MPFS”) on November 1, 2019. The 2020 MPFS finalizes six new CPT codes for e-Visits, providing new opportunities for physician practices to be reimbursed for conducting digital health assessments and evaluations for their patients and for remote patient monitoring companies to add these capabilities to their platforms.
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In this article, we focus on the proposed Care Coordination Arrangements safe harbor to the Anti-Kickback Statute and discuss how this new safe harbor may affect vendors of care management services such as Remote Patient Monitoring, Chronic Care Management services, Transitional Care Management services, and Behavioral Health Integration services.
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Despite division along party lines and industry pushback, the House of Representatives has passed legislation (H.R. 3), the “Lower Drug Costs Now Act”, which would require the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to establish a “Fair Price Negotiation Program” responsible for negotiating Medicare payments for some of the most expensive drugs available to Medicare beneficiaries.
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In a pair of proposed rules released by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the DHHS is looking to increase the utilization of value-based arrangements to drive health outcomes and ease the regulatory burdens associated with patient care coordination. The proposed rules seek to change or add certain safe harbors or exceptions to the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS), Physician Self-Referral prohibition (Stark Law), and the Civil Monetary Penalties (CMP) laws.
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General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) preparedness should be a priority and we will review the steps you need to take to make sure you’re in compliance. Though the GDPR comes from the European Union, businesses everywhere should apply GDPR principles in practice.
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On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (the “FTC”) released three warning letters to unnamed companies who were illegally advertising their CBD products.
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The Virginia Cannabis Industry Association (VCIA) will host a series of regional legislative forums over the next several weeks. Discussions will include an update about the Virginia cannabis industry and how outcomes of the November elections of all 140 seats of the Virginia General Assembly may affect the opportunities and challenges of this nascent industry.
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Maryland’s Secretary of Health adopted new regulations that lay out standards for the nonclinical practice of teletherapy by certified registered nurse practitioners/psychiatric mental health (CRNP/PMHs) and psychiatric mental health/advanced practice registered nurses (PMH/APRNs).
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In April, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new set of payment models meant to allow primary care providers deliver better care at a lower cost to their patients by removing unneccessary administrative and adjust payouts from procedures to outcomes.
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In Virginia’s 2019 General Assembly (GA) Session, five of six proposed cannabis-related bills passed and will soon reach the desk of the Governor, ushering in some significant changes to the Commonwealth’s medical cannabis program. Among them, allowing full therapeutic-strength medical cannabis preparations, and the addition of physician assistants and nurse practitioners to the list of providers permitted to make medical cannabis recommendations.
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On March 14, 2019, CMS issued “Technical Corrections” to address errors in the 2019 Final Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (“MPFS”) published on November 23, 2018. One of these corrections addresses “incident to” billing by clinical staff, and has important implications for Remote Patient Monitoring under CPT Code 99457.
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This Advisory Opinion demonstrates OIG’s willingness to remove barriers to adoption of healthcare technologies - such as lack of access to a smartphone - that may improve patient outcomes and reduce overall costs of care.
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On December 12, 2018, Congress passed the 2018 Farm Bill (The “Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018” or the “Bill”), which includes provisions that exempt Cannabis plants with lower than 0.3% THC content (also called “Hemp”) from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Once signed into law, the Farm Bill effectively legalizes the production, commercialization, and interstate shipment and sale of hemp and hemp-derived products like cannabidiol or “CBD”. Each state (including Indian Tribes and U.S. Territories) will eventually be able to regulate hemp production like any other agricultural commodity, as long as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approves its plan to monitor and regulate the plant’s production.
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The final 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (the “Rule”), released on November 1st, creates three new codes in the category of Chronic Care Remote Physiologic Monitoring (“CCRPM”) for (1) initial set-up and patient education, (2) initial device supply, and (3) monitoring data and interacting with patients or caregivers.
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The final 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, released by CMS on November 1, 2018, includes a new code that physicians may use to bill for remote evaluation of images to determine whether or not an in-person office visit is necessary. Learn more about HCPCS Code G2010 and how it can be used in medical practices.
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