Stories from Texas Medicine, September 2021

Healthy Determination: Texas Physicians are Finding Better Ways to Address Their Patients’ Social Determinants of Health - 03/27/2023

Austin pediatrician Sandra Frasser, MD, learned early in her medical career that many of the biggest health problems patients face cannot be fixed by a trip to the doctor’s office.


Talk to Patients About: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) - 09/06/2021

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is the early warning system for vaccine safety in the U.S. While it’s important for identifying vaccine side effects, the data it collects can be misunderstood.


Medicaid Relaxes Prior Authorization for Hep C Antiviral Drugs - 09/06/2021

For years, Texas Medicaid patients with hepatitis C haven’t had access to overwhelmingly effective, often-curative antiviral therapy unless they had advanced liver disease. In many cases, getting the antiviral drugs at that point was too little, too late.


Billing for Telemedicine During COVID-19 - 09/06/2021

COVID-19 prompted an increased need for telemedicine services to connect physicians with their patients. To quickly meet that need, Texas Medicaid adopted waivers and changed policies to ease technology restrictions and expand the number of Medicaid services available virtually. Reimbursement for telemedicine and telehealth averaged less than $800,000 per month in 2019. By April 2020, Medicaid payment for virtual services jumped to $43 million, and averaged more than $37 million monthly throughout 2020.


Data Driven: Medicaid’s Inspector General Focuses on Fraud Prevention, Not Just Prosecution - 09/06/2021

Since her appointment in 2018, Texas Health and Human Services Inspector General Sylvia Hernandez Kauffman has homed in on using data analytics not only to prosecute fraud, waste, and abuse within the Medicaid program, but also to prevent it from happening in the first place. Texas Medicine spoke to Ms. Kauffman about what appears to be a shift in tone from this department as it also focuses on using the data it collects to educate physicians and other health care professionals on common billing mistakes.


Creative Collaboration: Here’s How Physician Practices Can Help Patients Address Their Social Determinants of Health - 09/06/2021

For physicians, addressing social determinants of health can be difficult because they are set in motion long before a patient arrives for a visit and can undermine the best of medications and treatments.