Medicare and Chronic Care

By Quinn Phillips When it comes to treating chronic conditions like diabetes, one common complaint among both doctors and patients is that the health-care system is geared toward providing care for acute medical conditions: those that arise quickly and can usually be resolved quickly. Providing adequate chronic care can be difficult for many reasons, but among them is the way doctors are paid for providing care. As we noted back in 2011, doctors tend to lose money on patients with diabetes due to the extra time these people require. Doctor practices tend not to bill a patient's insurance provider — whether that provider is a private insurer, or a government agency like Medicare or Medicaid — for longer visits because of the extra scrutiny (and delays in payment) that this would invite. A new Medicare rule, however, might make it easier for doctors to prioritize the care of patients with chronic conditions. Introduced last week, the proposed rule would allow doctors to bill Medicare for "non-face-to-face complex chronic care management services for Medicare beneficiaries who have multiple, significant chronic conditions," according to an article at Becker's Hospital Review. This means that starting in 2015, primary-care doctors with patients who have two or more chronic conditions could spend time outside of regular appointments working on a plan of care or coordinating that care with other members of a patient's health-care team. Rather than being paid for time sp...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs