Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Chronic Care Management

Anyone developed a plan for documenting and billing the new Chronic Care Management code from Medicare? We will need to figure out a way to track time spent on patients, develop and document a Care plan. Just wondering if how others are planning on doing this within AC.

It looks like, just from my initial read, that you get 42 dollars a month from spending 20 documented minutes per patient. It seems more profitable to spend 20 minutes seeing another Medicare patient. Are we really hurting for Medicare work here? AAFP is touting this as a great victory for all their lobbying work. On first blush, it looks like a load of cow fertilizer.

The large groups with plenty of admins and the hospital owned supergroups will use extenders to work up the reports and minutes, and Medicare will get its clock cleaned again. And the rest of us will just see another patient.

Yet another example of moves to consolidate and benefit major corporations over individuals. Healthcare in America, Crony Capitalism.

I looked into using the CCM codes but they can only be used with patients with private fee-for-service Medicare which are Medicare Advantage Plans offered by private insurance companies. We only have a handful of such patients.

John,

My understanding is that Traditional Medicare will cover CCM. Medicare Advantage plans are required to do the same. This is really a game changer if you have a large Medicare patient load.

DM

Yes, if you research the Care Coordination Management services well, it really is one of the biggest Medicare initiatives that has landed. Especially if you are a primary care provider. Implementing a process is not as hard or complicated as you may think. I posted a process and information about a web service MyPHTS that my office is using to enhance our use of Amazing Charts for collaborating with patients on developing Care Plans and much more.

The post is in General Discussions and is titled "Billing for Care Coordination Management services (99490 - $42/mo).

The post is a step by step checklist. It also includes a sample consent document template that a provider's office may use.

And yes traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans are required to do the same.

For many of us, we are already providing care management services for our patients. It's about this aspect of what we do finally getting the recognition it deserves. It is well worth our time to figure out a process and implement it. Only one physician or qualified non-physician practitioner can provide the service at a time. It really would be a shame especially for primary care providers if while you're focused on seeing the next patient someone else is billing for CCM services on your patients. It should be a primary care initiative but they did not restrict the specialties that could provide the service.

We already provide the service. We all just need to document the process so the charge for the service can be captured.

The providers in our office have been talking to our patients about the consent for CCM services for the past two weeks now. We haven't had anyone decline the consent so far especially when we can demonstrate with patient specific examples that the service code is really an acknowledgement from Medicare that we already provide these valuable services and to encourage providers to develop even more robust patient outreach and care coordination programs.

If you'd like to see a demo about how we use MyPHTS ($49.99/month/provider) to enhance our ability to collaborate with patients to develop Care Plans, you may reach me through info@myphts.net or visit www.myphts.com .

Regards,
MKO
(Internal Medicine/Primary Care Practice)