Darius Tahir

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will pay for a wider range of telemedicine services during the coronavirus pandemic including remote patient monitoring for both chronic and acute conditions, not just related to coronavirus treatment, and allowing doctors to collect Medicare payments for making phone calls to patients. CMS previously required that consultations have both audio and visual elements. Some medical groups had pushed the agency to remove that requirement, arguing that some sessions can easily be conducted over the phone.

Wall Street may or may not be going through its long-awaited correction these days, but regardless, it still seems to have a hearty appetite for digital health initial public offerings. That appetite is provoking venture capitalists to fund ever-more startups.

Through June 2014, $2.3 billion has been sunk into digital health offerings compared with $2 billion in all of 2013, reports digital healthcare accelerator Rock Health.

“We think there's going to be four to five IPOs each year for the next five years,” said Steve Kraus, the lead healthcare partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, Cambridge (MA). That's based on the interest that healthcare IT startups have gotten from private sources such as angel (small) and venture (big) capital investors.