Telehealth Legislation We're Watching: CONNECT for Health Act

Some areas of healthcare have evolved at lightning speed over these past several years, with the COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching impact accelerating progress with relative ease. Adopted just a few years prior to the public health emergency's onset, chronic care management (CCM) is now solidified as a service and emerging care model — one that is bridging distance gaps and helping chronic disease patients reach and sustain better health for longer. Yet adoption has been slower than one might expect for a service with so many patient care benefits. Is the near-sighted perceived cost of this multifaceted solution deterring patients from taking advantage of it? Before we answer this question, and provide some reasons why patients and practitioners should fully embrace chronic care management, let's gain a better understanding of CCM.

Documentation Requirements for the Medicare Annual Wellness Visit The documentation requirements for the Medicare annual wellness visit (AWV) serve multiple purposes. Most importantly, documentation is critical to maximizing the value of the Medicare AWV to patients. As AARP notes, the Medicare AWV is "… designed to promote the use of preventive care, identify health risks, and plan for future healthcare needs." In addition, the Medicare AWV is an opportunity for patients to meet with providers who can also deliver or schedule preventive services, which we discuss in this blog post that shares HCPCS and CPT codes for billing the AWV and supplementary preventive services.

One of the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic was the increased adoption of virtual healthcare services and delivery systems. This includes remote patient monitoring, or RPM. Remote patient monitoring was a concept foreign to most individuals before the health crisis, but that is rapidly changing as providers increasingly adopt the service and enroll their patients. Yet many people still lack a firm understanding of remote patient monitoring, so we thought it would be helpful to dedicate a blog that focuses on the definition of RPM and contrasts the concept of remote patient monitoring with other terms frequently associated with it.