CMS issues the First Ever Guidance on Remote Patient Monitoring for proposed 2021 Physician Fee Schedule

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. - Aug. 12, 2020 - PRLog -- CMS displayed on August 4, 2020, the proposed 2021 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) with publication date of August 17, 2020 and comment period ending September 30, 2020 that has the first ever guidance issued on Remote Physiologic Patient Monitoring that is about 10 pages long https://spacinternational.com/pdf/RPM%20Update%20and%20Gu...  buried within 1353 pages https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-17127.pdf
Foley has done an excellent job publishing the top ten FAQ's for this guidance on their website
https://www.foley.com/en/insights/publications/2020/08/ten-medicare-remote-patient-monitoring-faqs-2021
Dr. Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) initially unbundled the cpt code 99091 for 2019 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) and then CMS released the codes 99453, 99454 and 99457 for 2020 PFS for Remote Physiologic Monitoring. Dr. Verma stated in November 2018 "You may have already heard my story about my husband's near death experience last year. Thanks to the bystanders and the medical team that treated him, he was able to survive a very serious cardiac episode. But taking it a step further, maybe we could have predicted his cardiac arrest before it happened if his electronic watch, or some other novel device, had been compiling information about his activities, his heart rate, his breathing, as well as other data – and sending it to his doctor."

"At Sargas we have been servicing several hundred physicians with our hru? Technology platform to help deliver Remote Physiological Patient Monitoring via an API integration with major medical devices that capture critical health data like heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, temperature, oxygen saturation level and more to help physicians deliver the triple aim in healthcare," said Git Patel CEO of Sargas.

"For RPM, if the patients are keeping a diary currently of their readings and bringing it to the physician on their follow up visit, why can't we have them input their readings in a cloud patient portal from home for the physicians to review this data remotely since not all Medicare patients have smartphones, Wi-Fi and are tech savvy?" said a USC graduate physician from our advisory board, one of our champions of RPM.

"Our physician advisory board unanimously wanted us to give patients an ability to input the data on the portal or have the clinical staff call and collect the physiological data over the phone, so they can proactively manage these patients and prevent progression of disease that would lead to hospitalization. Our team has developed an interoperable Chronic Care Cloud® that automatically uploads the data from various blue tooth medical devices for the physicians to review." Patel continued.  CMS is asking for the physician community to comment and help them design the best Remote Physiological Monitoring solution. You may submit electronic comments on this regulation to http://www.regulations.gov. Follow the "Submit a comment" instructions.