Most published guides to Michigan telehealth describe a state that hasn't existed since 2020.
Search the topic and you'll find the same claims repeated across a dozen sites: video only, store-and-forward excluded, patients can't be at home, controlled substances off-limits entirely.
Every one of those was accurate at some point. None of them is accurate now. The gap matters because practices make real scheduling and billing decisions on the strength of a page they found on Google.
Michigan's insurance code dropped its real-time-only requirement and added store-and-forward online messaging. A 2024 amendment now requires insurers to cover a telemedicine service at least as fully as the same service in person.
Michigan Medicaid added the home to its authorized originating sites, made audio-only visits permanently billable, and pays at in-person rates regardless of the patient's location. The blanket ban on prescribing controlled substances by telehealth is gone from the statute.
The rules are not the bottleneck. Documentation and coding are.
This guide walks through what Michigan law currently requires for consent, prescribing, private-payer coverage, and Medicaid billing, then covers the operational side.
Michigan's private insurance parity law arrived in 2012. It stopped private payers from refusing coverage just because a visit happened on a screen instead of in an exam room. Cover the service in person, cover it remotely.
Under the original wording of MCL 500.3476, a visit only counted as telemedicine when the provider examined the patient through a two-way, interactive audio or video system.
Store-and-forward technology, email, and faxed patient records sat outside the definition. Practices reading that statute today will find something different.
| The 2012 definition | MCL 500.3476 today |
|---|---|
| Real-time interaction required | Real-time requirement removed |
| Two-way interactive audio or video | HIPAA-compliant secure interactive audio, video, or both |
| Store-and-forward excluded | Store-and-forward online messaging included |
A 2024 amendment, 2024 PA 51, added a coverage guarantee that took effect on April 2, 2025.
When a service is delivered through telemedicine, the insurer must provide at least the same coverage it would for a face-to-face visit. Payment parity is a separate question, and Michigan law still doesn't require it.
Coverage was all the 2012 law addressed. It said nothing about which professionals could deliver care remotely, where the patient had to be sitting, how to document consent, or whether a virtual visit could start a valid doctor-patient relationship.
Senate Bill 753 filled those gaps four years later.
Signed in December 2016 as 2016 PA 359, it added six new sections to Michigan's public health code, codified at MCL 333.16283 through 333.16288, effective March 29, 2017. Those six sections are where consent, prescribing, and standard-of-care rules live now.
Senate Bill 753 became 2016 PA 359 in December 2016. It brought a second term into Michigan's public health code alongside telemedicine: telehealth.
MCL 333.16283 defines telehealth as the use of electronic information and telecommunication technologies to support or promote:
Telehealth may include telemedicine. It isn't limited to it. Telemedicine is a payment term that lives in the insurance code, while telehealth is a practice-standards term that lives in the health code.
Reimbursement rules have moved since 2016, and older summaries of this law get it wrong. Michigan's insurance code no longer limits covered telemedicine to two-way, real-time audio or video. Secure interactive audio, video, or both now qualify, and so does store-and-forward online messaging.
The health code also defines who's covered by these rules. A health professional is anyone engaging in the practice of a health profession — not a list of specialties, but a category.
Physical therapists, counselors, audiologists, and social workers all fall inside it, provided they're licensed in Michigan and working within their scope.
Prescribing is the one place the statute narrows. MCL 333.16283 points to a separate definition of "prescriber" in section 17708, and that definition governs who can write a prescription after a virtual visit.
Michigan splits two questions that sound like one. Who can treat a patient remotely, and who can write the prescription afterward.
Delivering telehealth is open to any health professional licensed in Michigan, working within their scope. Prescribing is narrower. State law limits it to a defined set of prescribers:
Each needs a current Michigan license in their own profession. A dentist isn't licensed to practice medicine, and doesn't need to be.
Controlled substances are where older Michigan guides go wrong. The blanket telehealth ban is gone.
A prescriber can now issue one after a virtual visit, as long as the usual controlled-substance requirements are met and a real prescriber-patient relationship exists — which Michigan allows telehealth to establish.
Federal rules are the shorter leash. DEA flexibilities for prescribing controlled substances by telehealth run through December 31, 2026, and permanent rules haven't landed yet. If your workflow depends on that allowance, plan to check it again before year-end.
Michigan requires consent for treatment before any telehealth service. Direct or indirect both count, and it doesn't have to be written — section 16284 allows oral consent.
Documenting it isn't optional, though. LARA's licensing boards adopted telehealth rules in 2021 that spell this out: obtain consent first, keep proof of it in the patient's record, and hold that record to the same retention rules as any other.
So oral consent satisfies the statute, but an undocumented "yes" leaves you with nothing to show an auditor.
The same standard-of-care rule applies to the encounter itself. Your chart notes for a virtual visit should look like your chart notes for an in-person one.
There's one exception to the consent rule. It doesn't apply when a health professional is treating an inmate who is under the jurisdiction of the department of corrections and housed in a correctional facility.
Charting two systems by hand is where this gets expensive. Front desk staff re-keying visit notes from a video platform into the EHR is duplicate work, and duplicate work is where consent records go missing Curogram integrates with any EHR.
Michigan doesn't require an in-person exam before a telehealth visit. What the law never spells out is whether telehealth alone can start a valid doctor-patient relationship.
That gap shapes how practices set policy. Two approaches are common:
Neither is prohibited. The choice usually comes down to specialty and risk tolerance.
Prescribing is where the ambiguity bites hardest. Michigan ties controlled-substance prescribing to a bona fide prescriber-patient relationship, and that relationship requires a relevant medical evaluation — which the statute allows to happen through telehealth.
Practices treating new patients remotely and prescribing at that first visit should document the evaluation carefully.
The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs has since issued telehealth rules through the professional licensing boards. Check your own board's rule rather than a general summary — the requirements differ by profession.
Michigan's 2012 parity law stopped private insurers from requiring face-to-face contact for services that can be delivered remotely.
A 2024 amendment went further. Since April 2, 2025, when a service is provided through telemedicine, the insurer must give it at least the same coverage as an in-person visit.
Same coverage isn't the same as same payment. Michigan has no payment parity requirement for private payers, so an insurer can cover a virtual visit and still pay less for it than an office visit.
The definition of telemedicine also widened. Older summaries say only real-time two-way audio or video counts — that limitation came out of the statute. Secure interactive audio, video, or both now qualify, and so does store-and-forward online messaging.
Telehealth is the wider term, and it isn't a payment term:
| Telemedicine | Telehealth | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it's defined | Insurance code | Public health code |
| What it governs | Coverage | Practice standards |
| Insurer obligation | Coverage parity applies | None created by the health code |
The telehealth sections say plainly that they don't require new or additional third-party reimbursement. That sits alongside the parity law rather than against it — one statute sets coverage rules, the other sets practice rules.
Michigan Medicaid is now one of the more permissive telehealth payers in the country, and most published guides haven't caught up.
MDHHS covers both synchronous visits and asynchronous services. It reimburses at parity with in-person care, which means the same rate no matter where the patient sits.
Two billing rules carry most of the weight:
| Modifier | Use it when | |
|---|---|---|
| Audio and video | 95 | Standard virtual visit |
| Audio only | 93 | Code appears on the MDHHS audio-only database |
Report the place of service you'd use if the patient were in the room. That single habit prevents a large share of telemedicine denials.
MDHHS defines telemedicine as connecting a beneficiary with a Medicaid-enrolled professional in a different location.
Several programs then layer their own definitions on top, which is where practices get tripped up — the program-level rule is usually narrower than the general one.
Telemedicine covers psychiatric services for ACT consumers, held to the same standards as in-person psychiatric care. Psychiatric services are the only ACT services approved this way. The telemedicine modifier goes on the ACT encounter reporting code.
When it comes to behavioral health treatment services, Medicaid defines telepractice exclusively as the transmission of encrypted data between two providers, for the purposes of delivering BHT services. In other words, remote doctor-patient communication will not be reimbursed and is discouraged.
MTM stayed narrow. A pharmacist may deliver it by telemedicine when the beneficiary can't physically get to an in-person setting, through real-time interaction between the beneficiary's location and the pharmacist's. Modifier 95 applies. Services delivered by telephone, email, or postal mail aren't covered as MTM.
Speech therapy, auditory rehabilitation, select hearing device adjustments and programming, and device performance evaluations are all allowed by audio-visual telemedicine.
Reimbursable codes are limited to those on the telemedicine fee schedule. Hearing aid examinations and most other audiological diagnostic tests still require an in-person visit.
Providers must be enrolled in Michigan Medicaid and licensed in the state where the beneficiary is located. They also need a path to refer the beneficiary to an in-person provider of the same type when clinically necessary.
Virtual-only providers — Michigan-licensed, no physical treatment location — can serve Medicaid beneficiaries. If they aren't linked to a Michigan billing provider in CHAMPS, out-of-state prior authorization rules apply.
Covered services live on the MDHHS telemedicine fee schedules and program databases, not in a fixed statutory list. MDHHS adds and removes codes on an ongoing basis, so check the current schedule rather than a summary.
A few program-specific limits hold steady. ESRD services follow Medicare's rules on frequency of in-person visits.
Where PIHP or CMHSP policy requires an in-person visit, a telemedicine visit can supplement it but not replace it. Initial physical and occupational therapy evaluations and oral motor or swallowing services stay in person.
The originating site is wherever the beneficiary is at the time of the visit. Authorized sites now include:
The home moved onto that list in October 2020, and state law also bars MDHHS from setting quantity limits stricter than in-person care, paying distant providers less than in-person rates, or requiring a beneficiary to use telemedicine instead of coming in.
Michigan loosened its telemedicine rules through a Medical Services Administration bulletin during the COVID-19 emergency. Most states did the same, then rolled the changes back. Michigan kept the important ones.
MDHHS settled the question in March 2023 with a bulletin on post-emergency telemedicine policy. The temporary allowances became standing policy.
| Emergency change | Status now |
|---|---|
| Audio-only visits permitted | Permanent, for codes on the MDHHS audio-only database |
| Home as an originating site | Permanent, on the authorized list since October 2020 |
| Payment at in-person rates | Permanent, parity written into policy |
Audio-only shifted in one respect. During the emergency it was a fallback for when video wouldn't connect.
Current policy frames it around the beneficiary — audio-only runs at the patient's preference, not the provider's convenience, and MDHHS still treats audio-visual as the primary method. Visits needing an assessment tool or visual observation stay on video.
Federal prescribing rules are the piece that never became permanent. DEA flexibilities for controlled substances run through December 31, 2026, with permanent rules still pending.
Michigan's rules give practices real room to work — home visits are covered, audio-only is billable, and coverage parity is written into the insurance code. The friction isn't the law. It's running virtual visits without doubling your front desk's charting load.
Curogram handles patient communication around the visit. Your practice gets a local number for two-way SMS, so patients can reply to reschedule or ask a question instead of calling.
Appointment reminders go out automatically. Virtual appointments, PHI sharing with patients and staff, and secure messaging between offices all run from one dashboard.
Curogram is also fully HIPAA compliant and comes with built-in safeguards protecting sensitive medical information. We've handled the technical work, so your team doesn't have to build a compliant setup from scratch.
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| EHR integration | Connects with any EHR and updates records automatically, so staff aren't re-keying visit notes into a second system |
| Familiar workflows | Patients join virtual waiting rooms, complete electronic forms, and get prepped by MAs and nurses — the same sequence your team already runs in the office |
| Automated appointment reminders | Templated SMS reminders sent with one click. Across our clients, more than 75% of appointments get confirmed |
| Review requests | Every patient gets the same post-visit request, which is what the FTC rule and Google's policy require |
The no-show numbers are worth a closer look. Atlas Medical Center cut no-shows from 14.20% to 4.91% within three months of turning on automated reminders.
Covina Arthritic Clinic now confirms more than 1,100 appointments a month without staff making the calls. Both figures come from our internal data.
Don’t see your state? We just haven’t written about it yet! Stay tuned on our blog or check out our article on telemedicine reimbursement by state.
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Book a demo and see how Curogram fits your Michigan telehealth workflow. Bring your EHR and your denial rate — 20 minutes is enough to tell whether it's worth your time.