Alliance for Connected Care Urges AMA to Ensure Coding for RPM and RTM Accurately Represents Clinical Utilization

The Alliance for Connected Care sent a letter to the American Medical Association’s (AMA) CPT Editorial Panel in response to its February 2024 meeting agenda, which includes Tab 50 – Remote Monitoring. The public agenda seems to indicate major revisions to remote physiologic monitoring (RPM) and remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM).

The Alliance is concerned that the revisions to RPM and RTM codes because we do not believe these changes would improve a clinician’s ability to manage care and we are concerned with downstream implications of this change – such as the potential exacerbation of concerns with appropriate utilization and practice expense calculations for the relevant device codes.

The Alliance would like to emphasize four overarching themes around which our response is based:

The Alliance appreciates the proposal to simplify RPM and RTM coding. However, given the significance of the change, we strongly believe the panel should not finalize this proposal without significant additional input and potential modifications from a wider range of stakeholders.
The Alliance believes that RPM and RTM should remain separate for the time being due to different clinical use cases, the evolving nature of the technologies involved, and the relatively new nature of RTM coverage.
The Alliance and its members are concerned with current and potential restrictions on overlapping RPM/RTM services across multiple clinicians and different monitoring services and the implications of this change on those concerns. We believe that simplifying coding like the application proposes would make it harder for payers to support multiple clinicians providing clinically distinct services, exacerbating this ongoing challenge.
While the Alliance agrees that RPM and RTM coding could be simplified and improved, we believe there are other priorities to consider in this conversation, such as addressing uncompensated care for the 20-minute threshold for reimbursement, changes to the calculation of direct practice expense, and coding to support the reporting of multiple medical devices for different conditions.

Read the full letter here, or below.