The American Telemedicine Association’s lobbying arm, ATA Action, acquired the Digital Therapeutics Alliance (DTA) in a bid to beef up its digital health presence and advocate for health technology further upstream in the regulatory process.
While ATA Action mainly focuses on extending already-enacted Medicare telehealth flexibilities in Congress and at the agencies, the DTA has been waging policy battles for payment of novel medical devices that Medicare says it doesn’t have the authority to cover.
For the DTA, the acquisition will likely be a boon for digital therapeutics policy at the state and federal level. The DTA has not had a state-level policy focus to date, and it has seen limited success with its marquee bill, the Access to Prescription Digital Therapeutics Act.
For ATA Action, the acquisition will bring more pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers into its member base, expand its reach in health technology and improve its international contacts. ATA Action’s member base already includes hospitals, payers, virtual-only providers and nonprofit healthcare providers.
The ATA and the DTA began talks to join forces in August 2024, Andy Molnar, former CEO of the DTA, told Fierce Healthcare. Things seemed easy from the beginning, he said, when he first talked with ATA CEO Ann Mond Johnson. The DTA’s members held a vote late in the year and unanimously voted to join ATA Action.
The associations’ membership bases had increasingly aligned priorities as both sectors looked to expand their health tech offerings and offer more options to their customers, Molnar and ATA Action Executive Director Kyle Zebley said.
Molnar said digital therapeutics companies have started to include telehealth and virtual care, and ATA Action members have become more interested in connected devices and software as as a medical device. The ATA has made modest moves to influence other types of digital health policy, like remote monitoring and artificial intelligence.
Since the acquisition, Molnar is now the director of digital health at ATA Action and special vice president of industry affairs at the ATA.
The digital health advocacy arm led by Molnar will be called the Advancing Digital Health Coalition, and it will combine the lobbying powers of the two organizations. The coalition will be ATA Action’s new hub for digital health advocacy and combine the DTA’s U.S. policy priorities, including Prescription Drug Use-Related Software policy and reintroducing the Prescription Digital Therapeutics Act.
“A lot of our work has been downstream well after FDA has validated the technologies we're advocating for coverage of,” Zebley said. “What's great about DTA is they're more upstream at the absolute cutting edge of regulatory approval for dynamic, new health tech solutions.”
Digital mental health technologies received unique codes in the CY2025 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule.
ATA Action will continue to advocate for all of its established federal and state telehealth priorities, like expanding geographic flexibilities for telehealth, reestablishing the ability for telehealth to be offered pre-deductible for individuals with high deductible health plans linked to health savings accounts, and encouraging the DEA to promulgate new rules for the prescription of controlled substances via telehealth.
The Advancing Digital Health Coalition will also begin to advocate for digital diagnostics, another unexplored area of health tech for the organization.
The DTA has created a significant international regulatory influence and has policy advocates with expertise in European and Asian digital therapeutics policy. ATA Action, by contrast, has a robust state-level lobbying force, which has weighed in on telehealth policy in all 50 states.
The focuses are complementary, Zebley said. Molnar said he hopes ATA Action will be able to represent the interests of the digital therapeutics community at the state level. Zebley said he hopes the ATA can lean on the international contacts of the DTA.
Molnar said only two DTA members were already ATA members prior to the acquisition. Now, all DTA members have memberships to ATA Action and the ATA. The additional membership to the ATA was important to DTA members, Molnar said, so they could join the organization’s special interest groups.
The expanded focus on digital health will be reflected at the ATA’s Nexus Conference taking place in New Orleans on May 3-6.