An End to a Year When Two Things Can be True at the Same Time
December 18, 2023
Cleveland Clinic Charges for Physician Email Responses – Why Aren’t You???
- February 6, 2023
Dollars for Their Thoughts – More Hospitals and Practices are Charging for Doctors’ Email Responses to Patient Queries
Reprinted from the NY Times January 24, 2023
Jan. 24, 2023
My two cents and then I encourage everyone to read the article.
Practice owners know that their “non direct services” including phone calls, emails responses, video conferences with the client, the family, and with other health professionals are an equally important part of client care. The issue at hand, for those of you who are not already doing this, is whether they should become part of billable services. Partially in response to the pandemic, telemedicine and electronic health communication has increased significantly. Cleveland Clinic reports email volume has doubled since 2019. While the CMS has, since 2019, used billing codes that allows physicians to seek reimbursement for writing message through secured portals, and many private carriers have followed suit, this has not happened for other providers including therapists.
A great January 23rd, 2023, NY Times article by Benjamin Ryan Dollars for Their Thoughts – More Hospitals and Practices are Charging for Doctors’ Email Responses to Patient Queries highlights this issue. Quoted in the article was Dr. Holmgren, who says:
“We’re at an inflection point with messaging. How are we going to deliver care in the future as we continuously move away from all care being a discrete visit?”
Now is the time, if you have not already, for you to take notice about how much time you and your team spend providing non direct services and start, in total transparency, to build it into the billable services you offer. COVID has shown us that not all services have to be offered in person. Another piece of good news related to billing “non direct services” is the recent announcement that beginning in 2024, PTs OTs and SLPs will be able to submit CPT codes for providing training to caregivers of patients living with a functional deficit. The new codes, which apply to training during which the patient is not present, will be listed in the 97000 series section of the CPT manual (Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation) and can be applied to the provision of training caregivers in “strategies and techniques for patients living with functional deficits.” Hopefully this will be the start of acknowledging that the hands-off education and training we do with families needs to be formally acknowledged and paid for regardless of whether the client is part of the session.
By the way, my position on email exchanges has been clear for the last 10 plus years for the practices I consult with. I charge for all my time reading and answering emails if they are not general inquiries but someone looking for my expertise. When therapists tell me they have a quick question, my response is that quick questions usually do not have quick answers. There is always one exception – Yes/No questions are always free.
Here is the reprint of the article.
To Nina McCollum, Cleveland Clinic’s decision to begin billing for some email correspondence between patients and doctors “was a slap in the face.” She has relied on electronic communications to help care for her ailing 80-year-old mother, Penny Cooke, who is in need of specialized psychiatric treatment from the clinic. “Every 15 or 20 dollars matters, because her money is running out,” she said.
Electronic health communications and telemedicine have exploded in recent years, fueled by the coronavirus pandemic and relaxed federal rules on billing for these types of care. In turn, a growing number of health care organizations, including some of the nation’s major hospital systems like Cleveland Clinic, doctors’ practices and other groups, have begun charging fees for some responses to more time-intensive patient queries via secure electronic portals like MyChart.
Cleveland Clinic said that its email volume had doubled since 2019. But it added that since the billing program began in November, fees had been charged for responses to less than 1 percent of the roughly 110,000 emails a week its providers received. “Billing a patient’s health insurance supports the necessary decision-making and time commitment of our physicians and other advanced professional providers,” said Angela Smith, a spokeswoman for the clinic.
But a new study shows that the fees, which some institutions say range from a co-payment of as little as $3 to a charge of $35 to $100, may be discouraging at least a small percentage of patients from getting medical advice via email. Some doctors say they are caught in the middle of the debate over the fees, and others raised concerns about the effects that the charges might have on health equity and access to care.
Dr. Eve Rittenberg, an internist in women’s health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, examined the effects of medical correspondence with patients in a study that found that female practitioners shouldered a greater communications burden.“The volume of messaging combined with the expectation of quick turnaround is very stressful,” Dr. Rittenberg said. She recalled one day when she took her teenage daughter to the doctor but was distracted by responding to patient messages on her phone. She recently reduced her clinic schedule — and took a commensurate pay cut — to free up a few hours outside of office visits to cope with other tasks like patient messages.
The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services first introduced Medicare billing codes in 2019 that allowed providers to seek reimbursement for writing messages through secure portals. The pandemic prompted the agency to broaden coverage for telemedicine and hospitals significantly expanded its overall use. The federal rules state that a billable message must be in response to a patient inquiry and require at least five minutes of time, effectively making it a virtual visit. Private insurers have widely followed Medicare’s lead, reimbursing health care practices for physicians’ emails, and may charge patients a co-pay. For several major hospital systems across the country, the increase in email fees has opened up a new revenue stream.
Blue Cross Blue Shield said some of its state and regional plans reimburse for doctor emails. But David Merritt, a senior vice president for policy and advocacy for the insurer, expressed concern that the ability “to charge patients for what often should be routine email follow-up could easily be viewed and abused as a new revenue stream.” According to the Cleveland Clinic, Medicaid patients are not charged. Medicare beneficiaries without a supplemental health plan would owe a co-pay between $3 and $8. The clinic’s maximum charge, hitting those with high deductibles on private insurance plans or without coverage, would be $33 to $50 for each exchange.
Ms. McCollum and other clinic patients are given the option of avoiding such fees by choosing to discontinue a query or request an appointment instead. Ms. McCollum kept on emailing on behalf of her mother: “I said, ‘Yes,’ because I need to reach her doctor.” She added, “It’s maddening.” Not all patient-doctor exchanges carry fees. Emails for simpler concerns largely remain free, including for prescription refills, appointment scheduling and follow-up care. According to several hospital systems and insurers, electronic communications that could prompt a bill would address, for example, medication changes, a new medical issue or symptom or shifts in long-term health conditions. Providers may only bill a patient once a week.
Nearly a dozen of the nation’s largest hospital systems said they charged fees for some of their providers’ emails to patients or have started pilot programs, in response to an informal survey by The New York Times. In addition to Cleveland Clinic, this includes Houston Methodist; NorthShore University HealthSystem, Lurie Children’s, and Northwestern Medicine in Illinois; Ohio State University; Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania; Oregon Health & Science University; University of California, San Francisco and U.C. San Diego; and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Other major hospitals are closely watching those at the vanguard of this new billing practice, according to A Jay Holmgren, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at U.C.S.F. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) permits doctors to send unencrypted emails or texts if they caution patients about the risks of unsecure channels. But to protect patient privacy, prevent hacking and comply with other HIPAA requirements, most health care companies and organizations discourage the use of anything other than the encrypted portals like MyChart that have become ubiquitous over the past decade.
Hospital officials note that while young people may be the most tech-savvy and wedded to app-based correspondence, they are usually healthier and less apt to keep in touch with their doctors. “In my own experience, most messages come from individuals in their 50s and 60s, likely because they are sufficiently familiar with technology to learn how to use messaging and are starting to have increasing needs, whether screening or illness-related,” said Dr. Daniel R. Murphy, an internist and chief quality officer at Baylor Medicine in Houston, which does not currently bill for emails.
Before the pandemic, Dr. Murphy found in his research that primary care doctors spent about an hour a day managing their inbox. But a recent study led by Dr. Holmgren of data from Epic, a dominant electronic health records company, showed that the rate of patient emails to providers had increased by more than 50 percent in the last three years. “We’re at an inflection point with messaging,” Dr. Holmgren said. “How are we going to deliver care in the future as we continuously move away from all care being a discrete visit?”
Many doctors and their assistants have little time during work hours for replying to patients. Doctors find themselves attending to such demands during “pajama time” before bed, according to Dr. Anthony Cheng, an associate professor of family medicine at Oregon Health & Science.