Telehealth & Medicaid: A Spring 2021 Policy Webinar Series & Summary

COVID-19 has forever changed many aspects of our lives, including how health care is delivered. With the arrival of the pandemic, a quick pivot to the use of telehealth to provide services was made, necessitating in many temporary telehealth policy changes on the federal and state level. Much attention has been paid to federal Medicare telehealth policy changes, but there has been less focus on the actions taken by state Medicaid programs.

PHI’s Center for Connected Health Policy’s (CCHP) Medicaid telehealth policy webinar series addresses this gap in knowledge and also provides a forum for states to share their innovative work on telehealth policy and engage with other state Medicaid programs.

With nine Medicaid programs participating, the purpose of the Spring 2021 Series was to examine specific areas of telehealth policy and their impacts on particular patient populations. Participating in the series were representatives from Medicaid programs in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and Washington.

Listen to the recordings to learn from high-level experts and administrators representing 10 different Medicaid agencies, as well as experts from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.

Speakers discussed the policies they have instituted during the pandemic that impacted the aforementioned areas and what temporary policies they will, or are considering, retaining. For some of the programs, their general telehealth policies applied to all populations, but a few did note that some services may have been more difficult to deliver via technology depending on age. For example, very young children may have been more difficult to examine via technology than an older child who may have been more willing to sit still during a telehealth encounter. As with other Medicaid programs, many of the speakers noted the significant use of telehealth to deliver mental and behavioral health services.

Access the recordings of the webinar series

1. Access and Equity in Medicaid Telehealth Policy
2. Medicaid Telehealth Policies for Children and Youth
3. Medicaid Telehealth Policies for Seniors
4. Telemental Health & State Medicaid Policies

Report: Telehealth & Medicaid: A Policy Webinar Series

CCHP also completed and released a report summarizing the four webinars hosted during the Spring series. The report dives into the findings gleaned from the presentations and synthesizes key takeaways from each Medicaid agency’s COVID-19 telehealth policy activities.

Download the report

Originally published by Center for Connected Health Policy