You’ve got patients! A case study in fair market value and commercial reasonableness: considerations for attorneys evaluating telemedicine arrangements

On February 9, 2018, President Trump signed into law the Bipartisan Budget Act of 20181 passed by Congress.  It incorporated the text of the Creating High-Quality Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic (CHRONIC) Care Act.2  The CHRONIC Care Act facilitates Medicare reimbursement for telemedicine services in various ways; for example, it relaxes the “originating site” (i.e., the location at which the Medicare beneficiary is receiving medical care) restrictions for patients receiving telehealth services for “purposes of diagnosis, evaluation, or treatment of symptoms of an acute stroke.”3  Concurrently, state legislatures are moving in the direction of mandating parity of insurance coverage between in-person and telehealth services.  As of 2017, 31 states and the District of Columbia have passed telemedicine parity laws, which require private insurers to provide comparable coverage for telemedicine and in-person healthcare services.4