Telehealth Changes?

[thegoaliedoc]

My wife has been working remotely as a mental health therapist, but her employer has been insinuating that with the end of the Covid Emergency rules, everyone must be back in office to continue seeing patients (can do tele-health from an office location but not from a personal home location). They are stating that insurance will be requiring a publicly accessible address to be listed to be covered and as they do not want to list personal addresses of employees this means everyone must be back on site. I have tried searching for the rules they may be referencing, but cannot seem to find them. If anyone is aware of what these rules may be, can you please share with me?

I had taken a job recently with the understanding my wife can continue working remotely, but if she is unable to, it will obviously cause some upheaval in our lives, so I want to make sure we are as informed as possible.

Thanks in advance.

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[splik]

Total nonsense. Doesn’t matter where the therapist is based. They don’t need to use anyone’s home address. The place of service is where the patient is - not the clinician. This is just because they want people back in the office. Nothing to do with insurance whatsoever

 

[reca]

They need her in the office so they can bill facility fees.

 

[Celexa]

They need her in the office so they can bill facility fees.

Yeah. This is my understanding from, admittedly, only skimming emails that mostly don't apply to me because I don't do any exclusively telemed days. It's not a licensing issue which remains based on patient location, but related to reimbursement rates if the clinician is not on site. All of our outpatient telemed notes now have to have a dotphrase that indicates whether the clinician was physically in the clinic or not.

I don't know if it's all insurances or only some but it's clearly enough for our hospital system to put muscle behind getting people back into clinic. But they aren't spewing a line of bull**** about why at least.

 

[allantois]

Therapists are impossible to hire. She’ll have no problem finding a remote position

 

[thegoaliedoc]

Thanks all. I assumed it was some BS to maximize their billing/get people back into office, so glad I wasn't missing something. Guess she can start looking for a new position.