Health care providers in the country are leaving millions of dollars in federal funding, which will certainly help them to provide better health care to the sickest beneficiaries of Medicare. The CMS recently announced that they are planning to launch a national campaign for encouraging the physicians to take advantage of these funds.
A recent report revealed that CMS has been offering an average payment of $42 per patient a month to physicians for coordinating chronic care services and consulting with specialists. Several experts in the field believe that this program will significantly reduce the costs for treating people with chronic health issues such as Arthritis or Dementia.
The program was introduced on January 1, 2015, but it was not used by several physicians because of the lack of awareness regarding the care management billing code and as a result of the pushback from clients. This is because the patients believed that they would be on the hook for copycat whenever their health care physicians bill them for it.
CMS recently reported that approximately 35 million people suffer from two or more chronic health issues. This means that the health care providers of these patients are eligible for being paid for their chronic care service. However, CMS has received chronic care claims for only 513,000 beneficiaries in the last year and it accounts for about $93 million.
The officials from CMS also claimed that many health care providers refuse to accept this payment because they have no clue or idea on how to bill patients according to the chronic care management code.
In a recent statement, the program manager for the CMS’ Office of Minority Health, Michelle Oswald said, “We’ve heard from doctors on several occasions that they want to implement chronic-care management services into their practice, but they don’t know how to get started.”
On the other hand, a billing director for Omni HealthCare, Mark Rostek informed CMS that several health care providers wish to bill for chronic care management. Yet, they are not able to do this because they have been receiving pushback from patients.
Rostek said, “It’s been horrendous here because we have multiple patients that have more than two chronic-care conditions, but they’re really reluctant,” due to their co-insurance. However, CMS believes that the new campaign will urge the health care providers to make the most of these funds.