In what represents just the company’s third PCT filing, Houston-based Starling Medical Inc.’s co-founders, Hannah McKenney and William Hendricks, seek to gain further protection for their at-home urine diagnostic patient-monitoring platform that eliminates the traditional use of catching containers and dipsticks.
The first patent from Palo Alto, Calif.-headquartered Updoc Inc. provides protection for their development of an artificially intelligent, voice-based method for prescribing, managing and administering at least one medication for management of type 2 diabetes to a patient.
Seung-min Park, professor at Nanyang Technological University and cofounder of Kanaria Health, is working to manufacture smart bidets that can capture biomarker data from urine and stool automatically and enable continuous monitoring.
The COVID-19 pandemic reset expectations of Medicare telehealth coverage, prompting a letter from dozens of members of Congress to Capitol Hill leadership asking for legislation that will memorialize telehealth benefits. But concerns over spending, fraud and abuse still hang over the discussion.
The problems with U.S. Medicare coverage for medical software are well known, but the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission recently indicated that these problems are largely manageable for services delivered via managed care plans.
At the American College of Cardiology's (ACC) 24th Annual Scientific Session held this week in Atlanta, SHL Telemedicine Ltd. reported the full results of the Imperial College London TELE-ACS trial, the results of which were also published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The COVID-19 pandemic is well known for increasing telehealth utilization, including remote patient monitoring, but there are still issues with payer coverage policies even a year after the formal end of the public health emergency for COVID.
Advocates are pressing the U.S. Congress to pass legislation to require more Medicare coverage of telehealth and telemedicine, but the Office of Inspector General (OIG) continues to report instances of fraud in this area. OIG reported July 24 that government attorneys had forced a guilty plea out of a telemedicine provider who has agreed to pay $44 million to deal with charges of fraud perpetrated over a period of three and a half years.
The U.S. Office of Inspector General (OIG) reported June 28 that it had launched a series of enforcement actions against perpetrators of a variety of forms of health care fraud, including in the areas of telemedicine and opioid abuse. The 78 individuals arraigned in this crackdown are said to be responsible for $2.5 billion.
Proponents of telehealth have been pressing Congress to statutorily broaden coverage of telehealth since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Telehealth Expansion Act of 2023 carries the weight of at least some of these expectations. The House Ways and Means Committee’s health subcommittee recently voted 30-12 to pass along the legislation to the full committee, but the bill operates principally to allow high-deductible health plans to cover telehealth benefits before the enrollee has met the deductible, leaving a substantial amount of telehealth terrain unaddressed.
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