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In the Furthering Access to Stroke Telemedicine (FAST) Act, passed as part of a budget omnibus in 2018, Congress permanently expanded Medicare payment for telemedicine consultations for acute stroke ("telestroke") from delivery only in rural areas to delivery in both urban and rural areas, effective January 1, 2019. Using a controlled time-series analysis, we found that one year after FAST Act implementation, billing for Medicare telestroke increased substantially in emergency departments at both directly affected urban hospitals and indirectly affected rural hospitals. However, at that time only a minority of hospitals with known telestroke capacity had ever billed Medicare for that service, and there was substantial billing inconsistent with Medicare requirements. As Congress considers options for Medicare telemedicine payment after the COVID-19 pandemic, our findings, which are consistent with confusion among providers regarding telemedicine billing requirements, suggest that simplified payment rules would help ensure that expanded reimbursement achieves its intended impact.

Importance: After the emergence of COVID-19, studies reported a decrease in hospitalizations of patients with ischemic stroke (IS), but there are little to no data regarding hospitalizations for the remainder of 2020, including outcome data from a large cohort of patients with IS and comorbid COVID-19., Objective: To assess hospital discharge rates, demographic factors, and outcomes of hospitalization associated with the COVID-19 pandemic among US patients with IS before vs during the COVID-19 pandemic., Design, Setting, and Participants: This retrospective cohort study used data from the Vizient Clinical Data Base on 324 013 patients with IS at 478 nonfederal hospitals in 43 US states between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020. Patients were eligible if they were admitted to the hospital on a nonelective basis and were not receiving hospice care at the time of admission. A total of 41 166 discharged between January and March 2020 were excluded from the analysis because they had unreliable data on COVID-19 status, leaving 282 847 patients for the study., Exposure: Ischemic stroke and laboratory-confirmed COVID-19., Main Outcomes and Measures: Monthly counts of discharges among patients with IS in 2020. Demographic characteristics and outcomes, including in-hospital death, among patients with IS who were discharged in 2019 (control group) were compared with those of patients with IS with or without comorbid COVID-19 (COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 groups, respectively) who were discharged between April and December 2020., Results: Of the 282 847 patients included in the study, 165 912 (50.7% male; 63.4% White; 26.3% aged ≥80 years) were allocated to the control group; 111 418 of 116 935 patients (95.3%; 51.9% male; 62.8% White; 24.6% aged ≥80 years) were allocated to the non-COVID-19 group and 5517 of 116 935 patients (4.7%; 58.0% male; 42.5% White; 21.3% aged ≥80 years) to the COVID-19 group. A mean (SD) of 13 846 (553) discharges per month among patients with IS was reported in 2019. Discharges began decreasing in February 2020, reaching a low of 10 846 patients in April 2020 before returning to a prepandemic level of 13 639 patients by July 2020. A mean (SD) of 13 492 (554) discharges per month was recorded for the remainder of 2020. Black and Hispanic patients accounted for 21.4% and 7.0% of IS discharges in 2019, respectively, but accounted for 27.5% and 16.0% of those discharged with IS and comorbid COVID-19 in 2020. Compared with patients in the control and non-COVID-19 groups, those in the COVID-19 group were less likely to smoke (16.0% vs 17.2% vs 6.4%, respectively) and to have hypertension (73.0% vs 73.1% vs 68.2%) or dyslipidemia (61.2% vs 63.2% vs 56.6%) but were more likely to have diabetes (39.8% vs 40.5% vs 53.0%), obesity (16.2% vs 18.4% vs 24.5%), acute coronary syndrome (8.0% vs 9.2% vs 15.8%), or pulmonary embolus (1.9% vs 2.4% vs 6.8%) and to require intubation (11.3% vs 12.3% vs 37.6%). After adjusting for baseline factors, patients with IS and COVID-19 were more likely to die in the hospital than were patients with IS in 2019 (adjusted odds ratio, 5.17; 95% CI, 4.83-5.53; National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale adjusted odds ratio, 3.57; 95% CI, 3.15-4.05)., Conclusions and Relevance: In this cohort study, after the emergence of COVID-19, hospital discharges of patients with IS decreased in the US but returned to prepandemic levels by July 2020. Among patients with IS between April and December 2020, comorbid COVID-19 was relatively common, particularly among Black and Hispanic populations, and morbidity was high.

Objective: To examine the outcomes of adult patients with spontaneous intracranial and subarachnoid hemorrhage diagnosed with comorbid COVID-19 infection in a large, geographically diverse cohort., Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis using the Vizient Clinical Data Base. We separately compared two cohorts of patients with COVID-19 admitted April 1-October 31, 2020-patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) and those with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH)-with control patients with ICH or SAH who did not have COVID-19 admitted at the same hospitals in 2019. The primary outcome was in-hospital death. Favorable discharge and length of hospital and intensive-care stay were the secondary outcomes. We fit multivariate mixed-effects logistic regression models to our outcomes., Results: There were 559 ICH-COVID patients and 23,378 ICH controls from 194 hospitals. In the ICH-COVID cohort versus controls, there was a significantly higher proportion of Hispanic patients (24.5% vs. 8.9%), Black patients (23.3% vs. 20.9%), nonsmokers (11.5% vs. 3.2%), obesity (31.3% vs. 13.5%), and diabetes (43.4% vs. 28.5%), and patients had a longer hospital stay (21.6 vs. 10.5 days), a longer intensive-care stay (16.5 vs. 6.0 days), and a higher in-hospital death rate (46.5% vs. 18.0%). Patients with ICH-COVID had an adjusted odds ratio (aOR) of 2.43 [1.96-3.00] for the outcome of death and an aOR of 0.55 [0.44-0.68] for favorable discharge. There were 212 SAH-COVID patients and 5,029 controls from 119 hospitals. The hospital (26.9 vs. 13.4 days) and intensive-care (21.9 vs. 9.6 days) length of stays and in-hospital death rate (42.9% vs. 14.8%) were higher in the SAH-COVID cohort compared with controls. Patients with SAH-COVID had an aOR of 1.81 [1.26-2.59] for an outcome of death and an aOR of 0.54 [0.37-0.78] for favorable discharge., Conclusions: Patients with spontaneous ICH or SAH and comorbid COVID infection were more likely to be a racial or ethnic minority, diabetic, and obese and to have higher rates of death and longer hospital length of stay when compared with controls., Competing Interests: Authors SH and ES declare an affiliation with Vizient. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS One policies on sharing data and materials; however, the Vizient clinical database has identifiable patient information derived from individual electronic medical records and administrative data and access is regulated to legally comply with HIPAA restrictions.

Background: Studies have shown worse outcomes in patients with comorbid ischemic stroke (IS) and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), but have had small sample sizes., Methods: We retrospectively identified patients in the Vizient Clinical Data Base® with IS as a discharge diagnosis. The study outcomes were in-hospital death and favorable discharge (home or acute rehabilitation). In the primary analysis, we compared IS patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 (IS-COVID) discharged April 1-July 31, 2020 to pre-COVID IS patients discharged in 2019 (IS controls). In a secondary analysis, we compared a matched cohort of IS-COVID patients to patients within the IS controls who had pneumonia (IS-PNA), created with inverse-probability-weighting (IPW)., Results: In the primary analysis, we included 166,586 IS controls and 2086 IS-COVID from 312 hospitals in 46 states. Compared to IS controls, IS-COVID were less likely to have hypertension, dyslipidemia, or be smokers, but more likely to be male, younger, have diabetes, obesity, acute renal failure, acute coronary syndrome, venous thromboembolism, intubation, and comorbid intracerebral or subarachnoid hemorrhage (all p<0.05). Black and Hispanic patients accounted for 21.7% and 7.4% of IS controls, respectively, but 33.7% and 18.5% of IS-COVID (p<0.001). IS-COVID, versus IS controls, were less likely to receive alteplase (1.8% vs 5.6%, p<0.001), mechanical thrombectomy (4.4% vs. 6.7%, p<0.001), to have favorable discharge (33.9% vs. 66.4%, p<0.001), but more likely to die (30.4% vs. 6.5%, p<0.001). In the matched cohort of patients with IS-COVID and IS-PNA, IS-COVID had a higher risk of death (IPW-weighted OR 1.56, 95% CI 1.33-1.82) and lower odds of favorable discharge (IPW-weighted OR 0.63, 95% CI 0.54-0.73)., Conclusions: Ischemic stroke patients with COVID-19 are more likely to be male, younger, and Black or Hispanic, with significant increases in morbidity and mortality compared to both ischemic stroke controls from 2019 and to patients with ischemic stroke and pneumonia., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)