New Report Details Recommendations for Telehealth Performance Measures

April 19, 2023 - Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a recent report from the American College of Physicians (ACP) described various steps for applying, integrating, and evaluating telehealth performance in ambulatory care environments.

Including members in over 145 countries, the ACP is the largest medical specialty organization in the US, with a membership base of 160,000 internal medicine physicians, related subspecialists, and medical students.

Earlier this month, the ACP detailed the uptake of telehealth and shared recommendations for further telehealth use and performance evaluation.

Known as Performance Measures for Physicians Providing Clinical Care Using Telemedicine: A Position Paper from the American College of Physicians, the ACP paper aims to provide a framework to ensure that telehealth performance measures are evidence-based, methodologically sound, and clinically meaningful.

“Over the course of the COVID-19 public health emergency we have seen a marked increase in telemedicine visits with our patients,” said Ryan D. Mire, MD, president of the ACP, in a press release. “Telemedicine can be a significant benefit to patients, increasing access to care and allowing care to be provided more efficiently. However, as we begin to develop performance measures to evaluate how physicians are doing in performing those services we need to make sure the measures are appropriate.”

To compose the recommendations, researchers reviewed studies and reports related to telehealth trends, adoption, and satisfaction levels among patients and physicians. They obtained all resources from PubMed and Google Scholar. Researchers also considered news articles, policy documents, and websites.

First, the ACP noted that measuring telehealth performance should include the same criteria as those used for in-person care evaluation.

The second recommendation noted that existing performance measures should be reviewed to ensure they are appropriate for a telehealth setting and can be operationalized.

Third, the ACP recommended the availability of mechanisms to allow physicians to access information generated through telehealth prior to performance evaluation.

Further, the ACP noted that performance measure testing must be conducted for measures that are deemed appropriate to evaluate the quality of care provided through telehealth.

Other recommendations include incorporating telehealth visits into the measure attribution logic and ensuring that telehealth performance measures do not adversely impact under-resourced communities.

Overall, the ACP aims to promote care access and outcomes while maintaining care quality through telehealth.

“The same principles that we apply to quality measurement for in-person care should also be applied to the development of measures for telemedicine,” said Mire in the press release. “The goal in all of our patient interactions is to provide high-quality care. Telemedicine can be an important tool in doing so and we need to make sure that measures encourage that high-quality without unnecessary burden, particularly for under-resourced communities and patients.”

As telehealth continues to claim its place in healthcare delivery, stakeholders continue to provide recommendations to ensure its safety and efficacy.

For example, in April 2022, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) encouraged Medicaid programs to study the impact of telehealth use and ensure that beneficiaries were receiving adequate care before establishing it as the new normal.

The recommendations from the GAO included collecting information surrounding the quality of telehealth that Medicaid beneficiaries receive and taking steps to enhance care based on this information.