Feds OK telehealth addiction treatment

The Biden administration Wednesday finalized a long-awaited rule laying out how some health care providers can prescribe gold-standard opioid use disorder treatments through telehealth (Source: “DEA, HHS finalize rule allowing telehealth drug treatment,” Roll  Call, Jan. 15).
 
The final rule from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services allows providers who have not had an in-person visit with a patient to prescribe six months’ worth of buprenorphine through telehealth, including through audio-only visits.
 
Afterward, to continue prescribing buprenorphine through telehealth, providers can conduct an in-person medical evaluation or continue treating the patient “via another form of telemedicine.”
 
The final changes mean a patient “will not necessarily need to be seen in-person by the prescribing practitioner at any point.”
 
The DEA and SAMHSA also issued a separate final rule Wednesday that would extend these flexibilities to Department of Veterans Affairs providers and a proposed rule to create a “special registration” process for providers to be able to prescribe controlled substances, such as stimulants used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder through telehealth to patients they haven’t seen in person.