Providers

Most telemedicine programs do not fail on the clinical side. They fail on billing, on compliance, or on operations, usually in the second year, once the launch energy is gone and the claims start coming back denied.

This section is for the people who own those problems: physicians, practice managers, compliance officers, and the administrators who have to make a program pay for itself.

The four questions every program has to answer

Will we get paid? The reimbursement guide covers Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial payers, the CPT and HCPCS codes, the modifiers and place-of-service rules that decide whether a claim is clean, and the difference between coverage parity and payment parity that determines whether a video visit pays what an office visit does.

Are we compliant? The telehealth security and HIPAA guide is long for a reason. It covers business associate agreements, the end of the pandemic enforcement discretion, vendor selection, texting and email, AI scribes, and the risk assessment that many small practices have never actually performed.

How do we build it? How to start a telemedicine program is an eight-step operating guide, from the clinical use case through platform selection, workflow design, staffing, and the metrics to track after launch.

Can our people do it well? Telehealth education and training covers what clinicians need beyond knowing how to unmute: webside manner, remote examination technique, documentation, and the escalation rules for when a remote visit needs to become an in-person one.

Policy changes that affect your claims

Federal policy moves in short increments, and each change lands in a specific line of a specific claim. The briefs in this section track the changes that matter operationally: the permanent status of virtual direct supervision, the retirement of G2025 for rural health clinics and FQHCs, the Medicare telehealth flexibilities, and the DEA's telemedicine prescribing rules. Each brief says what changed, who it affects, and what to verify before you bill.

Treat the dates in those briefs as a starting point, not a guarantee. Congress and CMS have extended, narrowed, and re-extended telehealth flexibilities repeatedly since 2020. Verify current status with CMS and your Medicare Administrative Contractor before you build a budget on any of it.

Where the state rules live

Licensure, prescribing limits, consent requirements, and Medicaid coverage are state decisions, and they differ more than most multi-state programs expect. The state law guides handle those one state at a time. The compact tracker shows which states belong to the physician, nursing, psychology, PT, and counseling compacts, read off each compact's own commission. If your patients are in more than one state, read both before you hire.

How to use this section

Read the reimbursement guide first, even if billing is not your job. Every other decision, from platform to staffing to which states to serve, is downstream of what you can bill for. Then read the HIPAA guide before you sign a vendor contract. The program guide and the training guide are for when you are ready to build.