In addition, lawmakers should carefully consider New Jersey’s recent telehealth legislation, enacted in early 2022, addressing telehealth payments and other regulatory changes. We urge federal and state lawmakers to look at the NQF issue brief for inspiration. The question of what will happen to virtual health care payments after the public health emergency ends is being debated in state capitols throughout the country. The NQF issue brief is timely and written to guide stakeholders, including public and private payers who must decide whether to continue paying for virtual health care and under what terms. The NQF Action Team recently released an issue brief that outlines challenges and recommends next steps for measuring virtual health care’s quality and effectiveness to support its continued reimbursement and to normalize this setting for safe, high-quality care.

The Quality Institute was 1 of 30 organizations that participated in the National Quality Forum (NQF) Action Team on Virtual Healthcare Quality, with the goal of identifying actionable opportunities to assess and ensure the quality of virtual health care. It also shares examples of entities that are providing equipment, training, and investments to increase access to virtual health care and to address the digital divide. The action plan calls for New Jersey to measure virtual health’s value to patients, caregivers, and providers, and to apply those findings to future policy decisions, such as whether payment for virtual visits should be the same as for in-person visits. In April 2021, with multistakeholder input, the Quality Institute issued “Emerging From COVID-19: An Action Plan for a Healthier State,” 2 which includes several recommendations on advancing virtual health care. The New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute has been considering these issues in New Jersey and nationally. Once the public health emergency declarations end, physicians, therapists, patients, and families need clarity on the future of virtual health care and the flexibility that many of us have enjoyed over the past few years. These challenges and their optimal solutions are part of a national debate. Finally, we must consider how virtual care can be used as a lever to improve the value of care delivered. We must set up a method to measure the safety and effectiveness of virtual care from the perspectives of both the patient and the health care provider. We must also ensure that virtual care is used to narrow, not widen, health disparities based on age, language, disability, geography, income, race, or ethnicity. To further scale and improve virtual health care usage, we must know that it will continue to be reimbursed in a manner that is appropriate for health care providers and systems. In 2019, the National Quality Task Force anticipated this exact landscape when it developed its recommendation, published in the report “The Care We Need,” to expand the use of high-value care settings, notably virtual health, throughout the delivery system as a key means of improving patient engagement, closing access gaps, and improving health outcomes. It is hard to imagine going back to a system where virtual health isn’t an option that patients can choose for many types of care. The changes ushered in an explosion of virtual care. These changes were necessary to keep people safe at the heights of the pandemic.

Rules around the physical location of the provider or patient were relaxed. The changes included paying the same for virtual visits as for in-person visits and allowing the use of familiar video platforms such as FaceTime or Zoom alongside a host of platforms developed specifically for virtual health care. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal and state regulators issued orders enabling the rapid expansion of all virtual health visits, from mental health to physical therapy.

Virtual health