April 11, 2019 Pasadena, CA – In 2017, a Primary Care Practice was looking for ways to improve their financials related to documenting and billing for Chronic Care Management (CCM) services. Being focused on Geriatrics, over 50% of their patients qualify for CCM under the CMS guidelines. After looking at their EMR’s functionality, they thought a program that was specifically designed to manage CCM would be better than working around missing functionality and complexity of doing this simple function inside their EMR. They selected Together Clinic in 2017 and have been delighted with the results using Together Clinic as it is comprehensive, simple and affordable.
It's been a process to get us to where we are today. Honestly, one of our biggest setbacks was billing. For lack of understanding of this program, our biller did not submit any of our 2018 CCM bills. Since we weren’t seeing reimbursements for CCM, it was hard to get the team on board to invest time in learning the program. We were fortunate enough to be able to bill all of our back dated CCM for 2018 with our new biller. Now that the doctor has seen the revenue impact, CCM is a legit program and we are fully engaged.
Creating a workflow that doesn't create additional tasks for our doctor and NP was key. Figuring out the correct workflow was a big challenge. That challenge made us move away from the program for a bit. After much trial and error, we figured out how to capture all our times to towards the program. This program benefits both our clients and the practice. CMS truly understands the need for a program like this. A successful CCM program in a clinic can be achieved and T+C plays a big role in doing that, especially with the proper workflow. With Together Clinic, everything is simplified, and we feel confident we are staying in compliance with CMS.
The tool has definitely helped clients who created their login and used it to log/track their vitals. Out of all the clients that logged in, I would say about 8 entered data. Out of those 8, only 1 or 2 clients continue to enter data, all others do not. It may be due to our panel being older adults.
As previously mentioned, our CCM reimbursement for all of 2018 just got billed this January. I've calculated some estimated projections and it seems like it will account for about a 30%+ growth in revenue with room for more. Using Together Clinic has been great because we've been doing the work already ... we just needed to capture, record our efforts, and bill for it.