Practice tip of the week: Pricing telehealth contracts

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With all the useful information available on Physicians Practice, it is easy to become overwhelmed.

With this in mind, the tip of the week is a chance to reflect on some of the wisdom found all across the site. In this August 2022 story on negotiating telehealth contracts for your practice, Tom Cowen gives these tips:

Pricing

Telehealth offers an interesting case for price vs. value, which perhaps has not been resolved yet and may likely take several years for the industry to solve. Over the past several years, telehealth current procedural terminology (CPT) codes were created and amended. The current list is still small and non-specific with codes 99441-99443 being time-based (i.e. 5-10 minutes). Does one value a cardiologist’s time the same as a podiatrist? More fundamental price/value questions still exist, like do patients receive the same quality of care during a telehealth visit? How do they value convenience or access to specialists? Expect to see an increase in more specific codes and an evolution of the price/value of these services.

Look for Contract Lifecycle Management systems that handle fees natively and facilitate frequent changes to the fees and codes that will evolve in the coming years.

Click here to read the rest of the article and be sure to check back next week for another Tip of the Week!