Telehealth News

HRSA’s Telehealth Centers of Excellence Program May Get a Raise

The House Appropriations Committee is proposing to add $4 million to the HRSA's telehealth budget for FY 2020, to be used on the Telehealth Centers of Excellence program, a telemedicine study and programs aimed at opioid abuse treatment.

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By Eric Wicklund

- The Health Resources and Services Administration could be getting a $4 million increase in its telehealth budget, to go toward Telehealth Centers of Excellence and programs promoting rural telemedicine and opioid abuse treatment programs.

All told, the House Appropriations Committee has proposed budgeting $28.5 million for the HRSA’s telehealth efforts in its draft fiscal year 2020 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (LHHS) funding bill, far above the agency’s $10 million FY 2020 budget request. The proposal signifies an increased interest in creating a national network of telehealth and telemedicine programs to improve healthcare access and battle the national’s substance abuse epidemic.

Markup on the Labor-HHS-Education bill, the largest non-defense appropriations bill and the first of 12 annual appropriations bills to be considered by the Appropriations Committee for fiscal 2020, began this week.

The proposed budget earmarks $6 million for Telehealth Centers of Excellence, a $2 million boost over the FY 2019 budget. There are currently two designated centers: the Medical University of South Carolina and the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

“These Centers identify best practices, serve as national training resources, and test the efficacy of different telehealth clinical applications,” the committee writes in its report. “Telehealth can provide rural patient access to quality primary and specialty care that would otherwise require patients to travel long distances for diagnosis and treatment.”

“The Centers of Excellence serve to promote the adoption of telehealth programs across the country by validating technology, establishing training protocols, and by providing a comprehensive template for states to integrate telehealth into their state health provider network,” the report further states. “Additional funding for the Centers of Excellence will serve to promote the adoption of telehealth services nation-wide and thus help to address the access to care issue faced by rural America.”

The committee is also setting aside $2 million for HRSA to “support a comprehensive evaluation of telehealth investments to date on rural areas and populations, to include an assessment of access, cost, experience, and effectiveness for patients and providers.”  It also asks HRSA to “conduct additional evaluations in conjunction with an academic medical center not previously funded through the Telehealth Centers of Excellence program that has experience providing telemedicine services across the care continuum in medically underserved areas in both rural and urban settings.”

Finally, the House committee is urging HRSA to invest in more connected care programs that address opioid abuse treatment.

“The Committee believes that innovative, scalable, and patient-centric solutions are necessary to address the opioid crisis,” the report notes. “The Committee urges HRSA to consider telehealth solutions and virtual models of care, specifically those models that allow for increased access to care professionals while decreasing geographic barriers and cost of care such as remote patient monitoring models. The Committee encourages the Secretary to consider pilot programs on a variety of telehealth solutions with the goal of finding an effective, scalable solution to treating substance use disorder in rural communities where access to care is limited.”

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