Implementing a telecare program for your elderly, chronic but stable, patients provides significant benefits to your practice ranging from the additional resource support that reduces your workload while simultaneously (and significantly) increasing your Medicare reimbursement.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have documented an additional 40 benefits for your patients, staff, and practice by incorporating Telecare, CareTrack’s patient management program. After learning about all these patient and practice benefits, the real question should be, “why aren’t we already doing this?”
The Telecare Value List
First, we need to define Telecare to make this list make sense – hint: it is not the same as Telehealth or Telemedicine. Telecare is a remotely delivered care coordination program for managing patients outside of the office in-between appointments. It complements your telehealth program and care coordination for your chronic but stable patients.
- COVID-19 is wearing your staff out and you need more help to stay on top of the remote patients who are worried about coming into the office, but also need more help because they are remote.
- We help augment revenue while your practice is dealing with COVID-19 Medicare revenue slowdowns – everyone is feeling the COVID-19 crunch, but we can offset those revenues with additional Medicare billables.
- CareTrack’s Telecare actually schedules more appointments for the routine office and telehealth visits as an important part of adherence to patient care plans.
- Your team can only follow so many patients intensely – on a weekly or monthly basis so you limit your coverage to the most critical patients. Some practices invest in full-time care coordination, but this also requires an investment of a lot of non-recoverable, non-billable resource time.
- Medicare provides for many additional billing codes that most practices don’t utilize. We systematize the Telecare model, so it leverages those codes to create an end-to-end telecare system that augments your practice model.
- We can implement a telecare system in less than two weeks without adding any stress to your staff integration with your EHR and workflow templates.
- Chronic but stable patients receive better continuous out-of-office support.
- Telecare programs provide more complete pictures of patient health and the state of chronic conditions.
- Translates to higher overall quality metrics scores across the chronic-yet-stable population.
- Higher Medicare reimbursements rates (up to an additional $2,000 per patient per year)
- Significant reduction in the amount of non-billable patient follow-up and administrative time to support the chronic yet stable patient-base while simultaneously getting better patient care monitoring data.
- Fits the standard Medicare reimbursement framework allowing for additional support without the burden of higher patient out-of-pocket costs.
- Does not cost practices anything to implement and actually pays practices at a higher reimbursement rate for additional services.
- Better documentation for reimbursement reporting, billing, and compliance.
- Reduction of unexpected surprises from elderly chronic but stable patients who end up in the emergency room or the hospital with symptoms that could have been caught with more frequent monitoring.
- Reduction in the amount of non-adherent patients who did not or couldn’t follow the instructions – medications, exercise, diet, blood pressure, glucose, appointment scheduling and more.
- Easier time managing the increasing administrative requirements for managing quality metrics.
- Contributes to patient quality of life and satisfaction.
- Patient adoption of chronic care management services is over 70% (comparable to the national average of <10%)
- Medication adherence improves by 56% on average.
- Reduced overall hospitalization re-admittances, emergency room visits, and condition reoccurrences.
- Drives increase of annual wellness visits scheduling rates – on average over 70% on schedule.
- Physicians and staff are notified through the EHR of material changes that require intervention or modifications to the instructions.
- Provides the patient with a structured, consumable care plan so they can better adhere to the care plan in the condition management process.
- Assists patients beyond the guidance given in the visits and information provided, to ensure adherence with recommendations and the individual patient care plan.
- Offers a tangible, comprehensive care plan playbook that includes recommended orders, medicine prescribed and recommended behavioral changes.
- Empowers patients to better self-manage their conditions and ensure care plan adherence.
- Proactively catch potential issues to prevent hospitalizations, close patient’s adherence gaps, and improve clinical outcomes.
- Provides an early warning system if the patient’s vitals are outside of established thresholds.
- Automatically updates your EHR to ensure patients’ records, compliance documentation, and billing are updated.
- Changes the economics for practices by doubling the per-patient Medicare reimbursement rates for physicians.
- Streamlines virtual visit workflows by providing the latest vitals prior to the appointment.
- Improves 90-day post-acute transitional care reoccurrence rates.
- Reduces workload on staff by filtering the “noise” coming from patient-specific conditions monitoring. Providers receive alerts only when outside of physician-defined norms.
- Centralized playbook for physicians and patients to collaboratively manage their chronic conditions which is much easier and simpler for the patients to consume and adhere to their care instructions.
- Latest patient health change information at their fingertips in a simple early warning dashboard.
- Continuous remote patient monitoring provides notification of when a patient’s vitals are outside of thresholds.
- Streamlines patient alerts, condition changes, order updates to patient records.
- Take critical, but non-billable work off the physician and staff’s plates.
- Provides physicians with more up-to-date patient information at their fingertips to improve diagnosis and treatment planning information.