A Moment of Opportunity to Expand Healthcare Access in the US
A practitioner perspective by Dr. Cole Barfield, Chief Medical Officer, First Stop Health.
The argument
The Rural Health Transformation Program and permanent first-dollar telehealth coverage open a rare window to widen access. Virtual care must be integrated with in-person services and care coordination, or it risks becoming a convenient dead end.
Why we picked it
The HTC editorial desk curates practitioner perspectives that pass a simple test: would a health system executive, product leader, or investor act differently after reading it? This piece by Dr. Cole Barfield earns its place - it comes from the operating trenches of telehealth & virtual care, not the conference stage, and it takes a position specific enough to disagree with.
The bigger picture
Virtual care's policy clock frames everything: Medicare telehealth flexibilities run through December 31, 2027, hospital-at-home through 2030, and utilization jumped 10.1% in Q1 2026 alone (our coverage). Health systems making the moves discussed here are building against that runway - and lobbying to make it permanent.
Read it alongside our own reporting in Telehealth & Virtual Care, where the data behind this debate is covered daily on the HTC Wire.