Coverage for Telemedicine Has Ended Abruptly. For My Patients and Me, It's a Disaster
A practitioner perspective by Ryan Nadelson, Chair, Department of Internal Medicine, Northside Hospital Diagnostic Clinic.
The argument
The shutdown-driven expiration of Medicare telehealth waivers immediately harmed patients who depend on virtual care. Telemedicine is core care delivery, not a pandemic stopgap, and Congress should enact permanent coverage instead of serial short-term extensions.
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 Ryan Nadelson 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
The AI adoption question runs through every executive conversation in 2026. The evidence base is finally arriving: the largest controlled study of ambient documentation, published in JAMA, found clinicians saved 16 minutes of documentation time per day - but only a third of users hit the usage threshold for maximum benefit (our coverage). Meanwhile Rock Health has stopped labeling AI as a differentiator at all, because every company claims it - which is exactly why operating discipline of the kind described here separates winners from demo-ware.
Read it alongside our own reporting in Telehealth & Virtual Care, where the data behind this debate is covered daily on the HTC Wire.